Seventh Age of Man: Regeneration

by Kevin Gordon

Brian always felt alone, but today he felt positively isolated. The old man’s words haunted him no matter the distraction, and he saw the fruits of his truth bloom in the scrutiny of his teammates. He saw in his peers the scorn of their elders, the unending braggadocio and hyper-machismo. They were all smart, but they were impatient, ready to snatch the world from those who almost perished saving it. They had knowledge without wisdom, without context. None of them lived through the fear of the Countdown, none of them woke wondering if this day might be their last. It was all a nighttime story, a legend that had no teeth.

  The complex itself was a sprawling facility, taking advantage of the ample room Scott Air Force Base provided. Even the old base in its prior configuration housed over two thousand people, now, with many of the buildings converted to dorms, it housed almost twenty thousand, its population almost evenly split between prototypes and archetypes. Dorms lined one side of the facility, while training grounds covered a third of what was left. The shuttle was housed in a large hangar just off the one remaining runway.

  Brian had been coming here for the past year, and in all that time he never grew tired of admiring the black and white beast. The shuttle was an immense thing, archaic in design, yet with a grandeur and strength he found irresistible. It was covered with rust when they first started working on it, but over the past year they had meticulously cleaned it, inside and out. Supplies were brought, as well as manuals on disc and paper, and Brian was one of an elite team of twenty that also learned the basics of how to fly the beast. The more he learned about it, the more he respected what was before; the world before Countdown.

  They actually made it, up there, he thought to himself, as he worked on one of the consoles in the cockpit. The programming was wiped as a result of a mistake early on. There were many mistakes made, as no one survived that had any direct experience with the shuttle. They had to learn everything from paper, and often it was trial and error in fixing something. Every panel of the glass cockpit was cracked from the accident, and only now did the parts arrive to fix it. In this ship, they orbited the earth, above it all. His dreams were filled with him piloting the shuttle, venturing out to meet the Watchers, convincing them to help the people of Earth. He always dreamed he would die in the attempt, gallantly losing his life as he returned with the Watchers’ message.

  “You done in there?”

  One of his close friends, Todd, woke him from his reverie. “Yeah.” He screwed back on the console, and climbed into the pilot’s chair.

  “Don’t get too used to that,” said Todd. “I’m gonna be the captain—you can be sure of that. Hey, look!”

  Brian peered out the window to see a formation of younger boys, all dressed in fatigues, march by to the shouts of a tall commander.

  “Fuckin crater-faced archetypes,” sneered Todd. “We should all be glad we weren’t born three years later.”

  “Yeah.” The archetypes were all twelve-year-olds, instructed in combat, meant to be the police force of the Homestead. Almost all of them were abnormally large for their size and with terrible acne, which led most to suspect they were being given some kind of steroid. “You ever think about who’s in control?”

  “Of the Homestead?”

  “No. Of those things.”

  Todd shrugged. “Does it matter? Like they said in class, we never hafta worry ‘bout the archetypes.”

  Brian nodded, as they both watched the formation move out of sight. Gunfire could be heard in the distance, as a bell sounded. “You think we’ll get this thing to launch?”

  “Who knows? We’re gonna need to get it back to one of the launch platforms, and somehow learn all the launch procedures. It’s a lotta work, and a lot can go wrong. Come on, that was the lunch bell.”

  “We’ve got to get it up there,” said Brian, seriously. “We’ve got to do it!”

  Todd laughed. “I know. But not today.”

  Brian and Todd ran out onto the tarmac, as the archetypes were lined in rows for review, standing at ease, with their hands behind their backs.

  “Watch this,” whispered Todd. “Atten-shun!”

  The archetypes snapped to attention, along with their drill instructor.

  “What’re you doing?!” demanded Brian in a loud whisper.

  “Shut up! Watch this.” He cleared his throat. “Right face!”

  They all instantly faced right. Brian had never been this close to a formation of archetypes. Though they were three years younger, many dwarfed him and most of his friends. He knew they had to be the strongest members of the human race now, and a part of his was afraid of their potential.

  But Todd felt no such fear, and laughed at his dominance over them. “Now, on your knees!”

  They fell to their knees, still rigid and at attention.

  “Come on,” pleaded Brian, pulling Todd away. “They’re not some damned toy.”

  “Stupid fucks!” shouted Todd, as he was pulled away. “Stupid crater-faced fucks!”

  At the end of a long day, Brian stumbled slowly back to the bus stop, alone, as Iris always took an earlier bus home. All day he was preoccupied with the archetypes, watching as they constantly drilled, trained, polished their guns and laughed a coarse, vicious laugh. He was consumed in his sorrow, which is why he didn’t notice the pack of human wolves stalking his every move.

  “Wake up, brain-boy!” yelled a tall, lanky boy as he smashed a rock on Brian’s head. He stumbled forward, dazed, but managed to keep his balance. After a moment Brian recovered, spread his arms out, and managed a clumsy fighting stance.

  “Ho-ho! He thinks he can fight!” A pack of seven boys and girls leisurely circled him, a couple with old bottles in their hands, others with rocks, and one with a metal pipe. It was dark, and their faces were shrouded in shadow. Brian was always good at avoiding traps like these, but unfortunately today his mind was in a better world far, far away. One of the teens threw a rock, and Brian just managed to dodge it.

  “Look at him! Clean clothes, clean skin. You hear what they eat?”

  “They eat real food,” sneered a girl. “Real meat, real bread, real cake!”

  Brian saw their dirty, torn clothes, spattered with blood probably from the long dead. There was a unity and concert to their movements as they paced around him, as if they had done this many times before.

  “Can you imagine that?” Brian noticed a tall boy was clearly in the lead. The others followed his lead in whatever he said or did. “Have any of you even had cake?”

  “Nope—not me.”

  “Can’t say I have.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  This leader came closer to Brian, motioning the others to keep a watch out for unwelcome intruders. “So tell me brain-boy, what’s cake like? What do you deserve to get to eat cake?”

  Another threw a bottle at his feet. The tall boy motioned them to stop.

  “Come on, tell me! Do you pull the slimy men and boys, women and girls from the cars all day? Do you open up the doors to a hundred homes, to yank out the rotted corpses that fall apart in your hands? Do you feed them into the machines to grind ‘em up, hoping an eye or finger doesn’t spit out and hit you in the face? Tell me boy! What do you do to deserve cake?!”

  Brian replied in the meekest voice he could muster, hoping to show them he was no threat and not worth antagonizing. “Nothing.”

  The tall boy roared with laughter that was echoed by his friends. “Have you ever picked up the dead?”

  “No.”

  The tall boy whistled with glee. “Then tonight’s your lucky night! Cause we’re—”

  Suddenly, a voice rang out of the darkness. “All of you—don’t move!”

  Out of the shadows sprung ten archetypes, clad in black. The teens all darted wildly back and forth, looking for a way out, but were pinned down.

  “Move away from the boy!”

  “Which boy?” whined one of the girls, as the others laughed.

  A gun fired into the air. “Do it now!”
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br />   They all backed away, as one of the archetypes motioned to Brian.

  “Now, over there! Move up against the wall.”

  In an instant, their expressions turned from glee and sarcasm to abject terror. A couple of the boys tried to stand up to the archetypes, but they were shoved back with the butts of thick black guns.

  “Line up!” growled one of the archetypes. “Hands behind your back! Now!”

  They slowly lined up, anxiously looking back to see what the soldiers were doing.

  “Now, you have committed the crime of assault against a prototype,” pronounced the same archetype, who seemed to Brian to be in the lead. He rattled off the words with a brisk, mechanical precision. “You struck a prototype in the head, putting into jeopardy the usage of his mind for the betterment of the human race. As such, according to article four—”

  “No!” screamed one of the girls.

  “According to article four, you are sentenced to death!”

  Brian whirled to the archetypes, wished he could say something, but their purpose was fixed, and inviolable. Their guns were raised the instant the charge was read, and without a moment’s hesitation, bullets exploded the heads of the teens, as their bodies fell to the ground. One still stood— the leader who bossed Brian around only moments before.

  ‘You will drag their corpses to the truck!” yelled the lead archetype. “Move!”

  The boy was bawling uncontrollably, as the archetypes pushed him along with their guns. He pulled his fallen friends by their feet, dragging them to a pickup truck nearby. He groaned with each body he had to lift, moaning in terrible misery that ate at Brian’s soul. He wanted to help the boy, but one of the archetypes held him back.

  “Now, get into the truck!”

  “No, no—please! Just let me go, I’ve got a son who needs me! Please!”

  The archetype took one step forward, raising his gun ever so slightly. “Get in the truck!”

  The boy’s legs fell out from beneath him, but three archetypes rushed over to kick him and yank him up. They practically threw him in, on top of his friends.

  “Please! No!”

  He knelt in the truck, on the chest of one of the girls, his hands clasped together as if praying. A single shot rang out, and he fell back onto his friends, bringing silence back to the night. The archetype next to Brian pulled off his mask, and gave him a card.

  “Now don’t you forget me!” he cried, with a simple smile. “You prototypes r’gonna run this world. When you get where you’re goin’, you call me back. Don’t forget what we did for you tonight. Those teens’ve killed three prototypes so far—you woulda been next.”

  Brian watched as they pulled off, and then vomited repeatedly in the dirt, not far from where bits of flesh and bone still remained.

  He got home late, staggering through the door with a riotously angry headache. His father was waiting in a chair, watching the TV.

  “Why’re you late?”

  “I dunno.”

  Brian tried to walk softly past, to avoid a confrontation, but his father’s hand whipped out and grabbed his arm, pulling him down close. Joe turned, with bloodshot eyes, his voice thick with liquor, and examined his son’s face.

  “You’ve got a gash on the side of your head, and you tell me ‘I dunno’?!”

  “It was . . . it was just some kids givin’ me some trouble.”

  His dad nodded, not letting go of his arm. “And you thought I was too stupid to understand?”

  “No! No,” he stammered, trying to pull away, but Joe held onto his arm as he stood. “I’m sorry dad!”

  “Maybe, you felt sorry for me? Maybe you didn’t want to bother me? Maybe you thought I was too old to do anything about it?”

  Brian glanced away at his last words.

  “You . . . little . . . SHIT!”

  Joe slapped his son, right on the bloody spot of his head, knocking him to the ground. Brian stumbled around, fading in and out of consciousness.

  “I’m sorry, dad, I’m sorry!”

  Joe kicked him in his gut, knocking him a few feet over into one of the TV stands. A wide plasma TV fell to the floor with a crash.

  “I see the way you look at me, boy—I know what you think! I think you’ve been livin’ too much of the good life. You actually believe you’re better than the rest of us.”

  Brian managed to curl into a ball, cowering in the corner. Joe spat on him, again and again, as he just sat, stewing in fear and anger.

  “Glad I wasn’t like you, or this whole world would’ve gone to shit. Get yourself cleaned up.”

  Brian finally got into bed, wishing for a moment that Iris was still awake so he would have someone to talk to, someone to lean on, but she was fast asleep. He pulled his sheet up over his head, wishing it could cut him off from the whole world. He pulled it down, got something from his wallet, and pulled it back up again.

  Gustav Klendricks: Senior tactical guard, Archetype column five.

  He read it over and over as the boy’s face conjured in his mind. He hated what was done to the teens, but Brian also knew that he would have been dead, if not for them. He thought on his father, and how the abuse was getting worse and worse, every day.

  The day after Brian came home, with the designation as a ‘prototype,’ his father avoided him at all costs. The only short time that he felt any love from his father was when the first shipments of food came. They sent enough for the whole family, and the minute Joe sank his teeth into a thick strip of bacon, a wide smile was never far from his face. After that first meal, when the family was happy and full, Joe hugged his son, and told him how much he loved him.

  But over the years, Joe began to resent how Brian was providing for the family, when he could barely go through a night without wetting his bed. He felt competition with his son, as Joe only had an EMA of fourteen at the time. The thought of all the things Brian would get to do, get to experience, weighed heavily on Joe. Every day Joe looked in the mirror and saw a wrinkled face looking back, saw the youth he was denied. He would watch as the young kids played stickball or football outside, running back and forth as the girls whistled and flirted all day long. He grew to hate himself, and through that, his precocious son, who didn’t seem to enjoy being given the gift of youth. Joe had lived through the tough times, lived a life stewarded by several eighty-year-old women who weren’t his mother. Joe’s life was one of ambivalence, as nobody cared about his emotional needs or development, only that he was able to eat and shit by himself, that he knew how to read and write, and that he knew fire was hot and the icebox cold. He never had a father to tell him it would be alright, to tell him how to act around girls, to tell him what to do when the specter of death would loom in his dreams, teasing with the thought of another Countdown.

  And Brian felt all those textures of hatred every minute of his adolescent life. Joe started selling the food he got, not that they really needed the money, but more to spite his son. Brian knew, but never complained, and that made Joe even angrier. Brian could see the hatred surge on his father’s face, could feel the heat of his fury when he came home from work.

  He’s going to kill me, someday. He held Gustav’s card in his hand, as if it was a magical token he could wish upon. But he actually loves Iris, and the twins. No matter what, I could never hurt Iris. I’ve got to find another way out of this life, before it kills me.

  Chapter 6