The End is Nigh (The Apocalypse Triptych)

by Adams, John Joseph

  Ricky kept asking to see the rushes of our movie, and Raine got his draft notice, and we didn’t know how the movie was supposed to end. I’d never seen any real propaganda before. I wanted it to end with Raine crushing me under his shiny boot, but Sally said it should end with me shooting out of a cannon (which we’d make in Zap!mation) into the Man’s stronghold (which was the crumbling Chikken Hut) and then everything would blow up. Raine wanted the movie to end with his character and mine joining forces against the real enemy, the Pan-Asiatic drug lords, but Sally and I both vetoed that.

  In the end, we filmed like ten different endings and then mashed them all up. Then we added several Zap!mation-only characters, and lots of messages on the screen like, “TONGUE-SAURUS!” and “OUTRAGEOUS BUSTAGE!” My favorite set piece involved me trying to make an ice cream sundae on top of a funeral hearse going 100 mph, while Sally threw rocks at me. (I forget what we turned the rocks into, after.) There was some plot reason I had to make a sundae on top of a hearse, but we borrowed an actual hearse from this guy Raine knew who worked at a funeral home, and it actually drove 100 mph on the cliffside road, with Sally and Raine driving alongside in Raine’s old Prius. I was scooping ice cream with one hand and squirting fudge with the other, and then Sally beaned me in the leg and I nearly fell off the seacliff, but at the last minute I caught one of the hearse’s rails and pulled myself back up, still clutching the full ice-cream scoop in the other hand. With ice cream, all things are possible.

  The final movie clocked in at twelve minutes, way, way longer than any of our previous efforts. It was like an attention-span final exam. We showed it to Ricky in Tanner High’s computer room, on a bombed-out old Mac. I kept stabbing his arm, pointing out good parts like the whole projectile rabies bit and the razor-flower-arranging duel that Raine and I get into toward the end.

  Ricky seemed to hope that if he spun in his chair and then looked back at the screen, this would be a different movie. Sometimes he would close his eyes, bounce, and reopen them, then frown because it was still the same crappy movie.

  By the time the credits rolled, Ricky seemed to have decided something. He stood up and smiled, and thanked us for our great support for the movement, and started for the door before we could even show him the “blooper reel” at the end. I asked him about our draft survival deal, and he acted as if he had no clue what we were talking about. Sally, Raine, and I had voluntarily made this movie because of our fervent support of the red bandana and all it stood for. We could post the movie online, or not, it was up to us, but it had nothing to do with Ricky either way. It was weird seeing Ricky act so weaselly and calculating, like he’d become a politician all of a sudden. The only time I saw a hint of the old Ricky was when he said he’d use our spines as weed-whackers if we gave any hint that he’d told us to make that movie.

  The blooper reel fizzed on the screen, unnoticed, while Raine, Sally, and I stared at each other. “So this means I have to die after all?” Raine said in his robotic stating-the-obvious voice. Sally didn’t want to post our movie on the internet, even after all the work we’d put into it, because of the red-bandana thing. People would think we’d joined the movement. Raine thought we should post it online, and maybe Ricky would still help us. I didn’t want to waste all that work—couldn’t we use Zap!mation to turn the bandana into, say, a big snake? Or a dog collar? But Sally said you can’t separate a work of art from the intentions behind it. I’d never had any artistic intentions in my life, and didn’t want to start having them now, especially not retroactively. First we didn’t use all our footage, and then there was talk of scripts, and now we had intentions. Even if Raine hadn’t been scheduled to go die soon, it was pretty obvious we were done.

  I tried telling Raine that he might be okay, the Pan-Asiatic Ecumen could surrender any time now and they might call off the draft. Or—and here was an idea that I thought had a lot of promise—Raine could work the whole “robot” thing and pretend the draft didn’t apply to him because he wasn’t a person, but Sally told me to shut the fuck up. Sally kept jumping up and down, cursing the air and hitting things, and she threatened to kick the shit out of Ricky. Raine just sat there slump-headed, saying it wasn’t the end of the world, maybe. We could take Raine’s ancient Prius, load it up, and run for Canada, except what would we do there?

  We were getting the occasional email from Holman, but then we realized it had been a month since the last one. And then two months. We started wondering if he’d been declared A.U.T.U.—and in that case, if we would ever officially find out what had happened to him.

  • • • •

  A few days before Raine was supposed to report for death school, there was going to be a huge anti-war protest in Raleigh, and so we drove all the way there with crunchy bars and big bottles of grape sprocket juice, so we’d be sugared up for peace. We heard all the voices and drums before we saw the crowd, then there was a spicy smell and we saw people of twenty different genders and religions waving signs and pumping the air and chanting old-school style about what we wanted and when we wanted it. A platoon of bored cops in riot gear stood off to the side. We found parking a couple blocks away from the crowd, then tried to find a cranny to slip into with our signs. We were looking around at all the other objectors, not smiling but cheering, and then I spotted Ricky a dozen yards away in the middle of a lesbian posse. And a few feet away from him, another big neckless angry guy. I started seeing them everywhere, dotted throughout the crowd. They weren’t wearing the bandanas; they were blending in until they got some kind of signal.

  I grabbed Sally’s arm. “Hey, we have to get out of here.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about? We just got here!”

  I pulled at her. It was hard to hear each other with all the bullhorns and loudspeakers, and the chanting. “Come on! Grab Raine, this is about to go crazy. I’ll make a distraction.”

  “It’s always about you making a distraction! Can’t you just stop for a minute? Why don’t you just grow the fuck up? I’m so sick of your bullshit. They’re going to kill Raine, and you don’t even care!” I’d never seen Sally’s eyes so small, her face so red.

  “Sally, look over there, it’s Ricky. What’s he doing here?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I tried to pull both of them at once, but the ground had gotten soddy from so many protestor boots, and I slipped and fell into the dirt. Sally screamed at me to stop clowning around for once, and then one of the ISO punks stepped on my leg by mistake, then landed on top of me, and the crowd was jostling the punk as well as me, so we couldn’t untangle ourselves. Someone else stepped on my hand.

  I rolled away from the punk and sprang upright just as the first gunshot sounded. I couldn’t tell who was firing, or at what, but it sounded nearby. Everyone in the crowd shouted without slogans this time and I went down again with boots in my face. I saw a leg that looked like Sally’s and I tried to grab for her. More shots, and police bullhorns calling for us to surrender. Forget getting out of there, we had to stay down even if they trampled us. I kept seeing Sally’s feet but I couldn’t reach her. Then a silver shoe almost stepped on my face. I stared at the bright laces a second, then grabbed at Raine’s silvery ankle, but he wouldn’t go down because the crowd held him up. I got upright and came face-to-shiny-face with Raine. “Listen to me,” I screamed over another rash of gunfire. “We have to get Sally, and then we have to—”

  Raine’s head exploded. Silver turned red, and my mouth was suddenly full of something warm and dark-tasting, and then several people fleeing in opposite directions crashed into me and I swallowed. I swallowed and doubled over as the crowd smashed into me, and I forced myself not to vomit because I needed to be able to breathe. Then the crowd pushed me down again and my last thought before I blacked out was that with this many extras, all we really needed would be a crane and a few dozen skateboards and we could have had a really cool set piece.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Charlie Jane And
ers’ story “Six Months Three Days” won a Hugo Award and was shortlisted for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. Her writing has appeared in Mother Jones, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Tor.com, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes, and elsewhere. She’s the managing editor of io9.com and runs the long-running Writers With Drinks reading series in San Francisco. More info at charliejane.net.

  THE GODS WILL NOT BE CHAINED

  Ken Liu

  Maddie hated the moment when she came home from school and woke her computer.

  There was a time when she had loved the bulky old laptop whose keys had been worn down over the years until what was left of the lettering appeared like glyphs, a hand-me-down from her father that she had kept going with careful upgrades: it kept her in touch with faraway friends, allowed her to see that the world was much bigger and wider than the narrow confines of her daily life. Her father had taught her how to speak to the trusty machine in strings of symbols that made it do things, obey her will. She had felt like the smartest girl in the world when he had told her how proud he was of her facility with computer languages; together, they had shared a satisfaction in mastering the machine. She had once thought she’d grow up to be a computer engineer, just like . . .

  She pushed the thought of her father out of her mind. Still too painful.

  The icons for the email and chat apps bounced, telling her she had new messages. The prospect terrified her.

  She took a deep breath and clicked on the email app. Quickly, she scanned through the message headers: one was from her grandmother, two were from online stores, informing her of sales. There was also a news digest, something her father had helped her set up to track topics of interest to both of them. She had not had the heart to delete it after he died.

  TODAY’S HEADLINES:

  * Market Anomaly Deemed Result of High-Speed Trading Algorithms

  * Pentagon Suggests Unmanned Drones Will Outduel Human Pilots

  * Singularity Institute Announces Timeline for Achieving Immortality

  * Researchers Fear Mysterious Computer Virus Able to Jump From Speakers to Microphones

  Slowly, she let out her breath. Nothing from . . . them.

  She opened the email from Grandma. Some pictures from her garden: a humming bird drinking from a bird feeder; the first tomatoes, green and tiny on the vine like beads made of jade; Basil at the end of the driveway, his tail a wagging blur, gazing longingly at some car in the street.

  That's my day so far. Hope you’re having a good one at the new school, too.

  Maddie smiled, and then her eyes grew warm and wet. She wiped them quickly and started to compose a reply:

  I miss you.

  She wished she were back in that house on the edge of a small town in Pennsylvania. The school there had been tiny and the academic work had perhaps been too easy for her, but she had always felt safe. Who knew that eighth grade could be so hard?

  I'm having problems with some girls at school.

  It had started on Maddie’s first day at the new school. The beautiful, implacable Suzie had seemingly turned the whole school against her. Maddie tried to make peace with her, to find out what she had done that so displeased the schoolyard queen, but her efforts had only seemed to make things worse. The way she dressed, the way she spoke, the way she smiled too much or didn’t smile enough—everything was fodder for mockery and ridicule. She now suspected that, like all despots, Suzie’s hatred for her did not need a rational explanation—it was enough that persecuting Maddie brought her pleasure and that others would try to curry her favor by adding to Maddie’s misery. Maddie spent her hours at school in paranoia, uncertain if a smile or any other friendly gesture was but a trap to get her to let down her guard so that she could be cut deeper.

  I wish we were with you.

  But Mom had found this job, this good-paying job, and how could she not take it? It had been two years since Dad died. She and Maddie couldn't go on living at Grandma's place forever.

  Maddie deleted what she had written. It would only make Grandma worry, and then she'd call Mom, and Mom would want to talk to the teachers, which would make things so much worse that she couldn’t even imagine. Why spread sadness around when others couldn’t help?

  School is all right. I'm really happy here.

  The lie made her feel stronger. Wasn’t lying to protect others the surest sign you were growing up?

  She sent the email, and saw that a new message had arrived in her inbox. It was from “truth_teller02,” and the subject was “Too scared?”

  Her heart began to pound. She didn’t want to click on it. But if she deleted it without reading, did that mean they were right? That she was weak? Did it mean that they'd won?

  She clicked on the message.

  Why are you so ugly? I bet you wish you could kill yourself. You really should.

  Attached to the message was an image: a picture of Maddie taken with a cellphone. She was running through the halls between classes. Her eyes were wide and intense, and she was biting her bottom lip. She remembered how she had felt: lonely, her stomach tied up in a knot.

  The picture had been photoshopped so that she had the nose and ears of a pig.

  Her face felt like it was on fire. She willed the tears to subside. She was self-conscious about her weight, and they had seen right through her. It was amazing how effective such a cheap trick could be.

  She didn’t know which one of the girls had sent this. She imagined Suzie’s cruel, contemptuous smile as she viewed this latest offering from one of her minions. A good portrait of Piggy.

  She had stopped using social networking sites because of the constant stream of mockery—when she deleted any of their comments, it only made them redouble their efforts. If she tried to block anyone, she thought it might also make them think they got to her, might appear as an admission of weakness. She had no choice but to endure.

  Sticks and stones. But the digital world, the world of bits and electrons, of words and images—it had brought her so much joy, felt so intimate that she thought of it a part of herself.

  And it hurt.

  She crawled into bed and cried until she fell asleep.

  • • • •

  Maddie stared at the screen, confused.

  A new chat window had popped up. It wasn’t from any account she recognized—in fact, there was no chat id at all. She could not recall ever seeing such a thing.

  What did they want? To tease her more about the email? If she didn’t say anything, would that also be a concession of weakness? She typed on the keyboard, reluctantly pecking out each letter.

  Yeah, I saw. What do you want?

  Maddie frowned. You’re confused? Can’t talk? All right, I’ll play along.

  The mysterious chatter’s choice of emoji instead of other emoticons made her more inclined to continue this odd conversation. She had a special emotional bond to the silly little glyphs. She and her father had once played a version of Pictionary over their phones, except they used emoji instead of drawing pictures.

  She picked out the icons from a palette:

  The mystery chatter—she decided to call whoever it was “Emo”—responded:

  Maddie stared at the face of the goblin, still uncertain. Another emoji appeared on the screen:

  She laughed. Okay, so at least Emo was friendly.

  Yes, the email made her feel shitty:

  The response:

  Easier said than done, she thought. I wish I could be unmoved and let the words bounce off me, like dying embers striking harmlessly against stone. She brought up the palette again:

  The response:

  She pondered what that meant. An umbrella in the rain. Protection? Emo, what are you offering? She typed:

  Emo’s response:

  She was suspicious. Who are you?

  The answer came after a few seconds:

  • • • •

  The next day at school, Suzie appeared skittish and distracted. Every time her
phone vibrated, she took it out and gingerly poked at the screen. Her face seemed flushed, her expression hovering between fear and anger.

  Maddie was very familiar with that look.

  “What’s wrong with you?” asked Erin, one of Suzie’s best friends.

  Suzie shot her a hard, suspicious look, and turned away without saying anything.

  By fourth period, most of the girls who had been giving Maddie a hard time shared that haunted, everybodyhatesmenobodylikesme look. Accusations and counteraccusations flew back and forth; cliques gathered between classes to whisper and broke apart, screaming. Some of the girls came out of the bathroom with red eyes.

  All day, they left Maddie alone.

  • • • •

  Maddie laughed. The two dancing girls did look a bit like Suzie and Erin. Backstabbing. Finger pointing.

  Maddie nodded in understanding. If Emo could pop up on her screen uninvited, of course Emo could also track down who had sent her those emails and messages and serve her tormenters a taste of their own medicine. All that Emo had done was redirect a few messages meant for Maddie at the other girls, and their own paranoia and insecurities had done the rest. The fragile web that bound them together was easily tangled.

  She was grateful and happy:

  The response:

  But why are you helping me? She still had no answer to the question. So she typed:

  The response:

  She didn’t understand.

  There was a pause, and then: