Skullcrack City

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

  Each mind spun through the sound like debris caught in a tornado. Everyone wanted something different: to make the little girl stop/to see what she might look like dead/to carve her into pieces/to escape/to leave this place and find the sun. My body was moving again, each mind doing what it could in the moments it fell outside of the black noise of her transmission. I watched from inside myself as we found the strength to push up and back, throwing the girl off. The more we thought of the body as a collection of parts, the stronger we became, each of us moving the machine as we pinned the girl down and felt our own nose start to bleed and prayed for that sound to cease. Vision slipped away again but we surged back, and it was Tikoshi who first noticed—no, admired—the jutting bone of the leg bent beneath us. He was the one who knew how to twist the girl’s broken limb toward her and when I could see what was going to happen I thought, “I’m so sorry, Katy.” But we had to survive this and we hoped that in some way she’d be saved from their realm if we killed her now, so we held her little pink and white shoe to our chest and centered the sharp pointed bone which extended beyond it and dropped our weight down as hard as we could, driving the wreckage of her leg through the soft center of her throat.

  The sound stopped.

  We staggered back over to Dara at the edge of the bluff. Her rifle had fallen to the ground.

  Dara/Serious Woman/that broad/the quiet one/Dara.

  Care for her/grab the rifle/we must see Akatsuki/bury her deep/oh god no.

  We felt the dark signal fading, diluted among the minds who’d never fallen into its full sway.

  “Dara?” No movement. No sound.

  Nothing.

  We’d only survived together, but I couldn’t share this with the others, even the ones who I knew hurt like me at her loss.

  We must contain Tikoshi.

  He protested, but we’d grown stronger. We imagined the sound of his stone prison sliding closed.

  The rest of us were silent, transfixed by the sight of Dara on the ground.

  I’m closing all the doors.

  I knelt by Dara, pushed the bloody rock away from her head, and rolled her onto her side. Her eyes were wide, pupils blown.

  I put my cheek to her mouth. No breath. I placed my fingers on her neck. No pulse.

  They ruin everything.

  I grabbed Dara’s rifle and sighted in on Akatsuki below. He was sated. A nearly headless corpse was swaying from the crane arm, bleeding out above Akatsuki’s bound torso.

  I scoped in tighter on Akatsuki’s face—his eyes were swirling black. Four men were holding on to his ovipositor tube as it convulsed and fed his tainted viral load into Meier Reservoir. I moved the crosshairs back to Akatsuki’s face. I pictured his skull rupturing, his brain matter and blood sluicing into the water. I’d only add to the infectious deluge—every inch of Tikoshi’s skullcracker was ripe with the virus.

  They’d won.

  By morning the citizens of our fair city would find themselves changing shape, reborn as strange new gods, unknowingly working slave labor for old gods.

  They’d eat each other alive.

  So not that much would change, not really, until some day in the future when the Vakhtang finally found the perfect balance and their Robbie Dawn single went global and their film projector started hypnotizing people into submission at fifty frames-per-second and then in a few months the planet would be covered in swaying black-eyed skullcrackers singing to the sky in dead frequencies, and then, finally, one day there wouldn’t be any more days and whatever was left of this universe would pull through into their realm and anything that was ever good on this fucking planet would be ruined beyond comprehension.

  In hindsight, it would have been cooler if I could have confronted that idea with some noble thought about universal oneness, galaxies expanding and collapsing, the whole glorious show and my infinitesimal place in it and the beauty of giving a damn and fighting for it at all. But at the time, I was pretty roughed up, so my real response was just:

  Fuck that.

  My next thought:

  So how do I keep going?

  I can’t do this alone. I need her. And I love her. I really do.

  I leaned over and kissed Dara on her temple, felt on my lips how her skin was already cooling. I thought about how she’d saved my life, no matter the consequences.

  And then I hoped, deep down, that she’d find it in her heart to forgive me for what I was about to do.

  I left her body on the bluff, arms crossed. After I put away the surgical instruments, I wrapped her head in the same soft gray turban that Tikoshi had placed on me. She looked beautiful. I remembered the photo I’d found—Dara and Cassie at a picnic on a bright summer afternoon. I tucked the picture under her arms, over her heart.

  I felt bad for abandoning her body, but that part of Mt. Meier was very pretty, and I thought she’d approve. I had to make it out of the city before Akatsuki’s tainted water launched its wave of forcible evolution.

  I was thirty miles outside of town, watching the sun rise over the evergreen trees that marked the beginning of the mountain pass, when I finally heard her voice inside my head.

  Doyle?

  “Yeah, it’s me. You’re still Dara. You’re here now, and that’s mostly a good thing, I hope.”

  I’m alive?

  “As much as I am, I guess. You don’t have to have a hallway. You can just stay here if you want.”

  I might want a hallway. This is real? You saved me?

  “Yeah.”

  Shit.

  “I know.”

  How did I die?

  “Katy turned into a mimic. She brained you with a rock.”

  But you’re still alive. Did you stop the Vakhtang?

  “No. And we lost Katy. And I let Dr. Tikoshi out of containment and he showed me how to murder a little girl. It was pretty much the worst night of my life.”

  Worse than mine?

  “I saw you die, so…it was bad. I thought I’d have to keep doing this without you.”

  I’m sorry…I love you, Doyle.

  “I love you, too. I hope this is real.”

  This is weird. I can see your face if I remember you…What now?

  “I need your guidance on something. I’ve been thinking while I waited for you. Just hear me out. You said that they ruin everything, right?”

  Yeah. It’s their M.O. It’s all they do.

  “Okay. So what if there was nothing left to ruin?”

  What are you saying?

  “What if we beat them to the punch? What if we save the human race by bringing it to an end before anyone else gets the chance?”

  How much of this idea is yours, and how much of it is Tikoshi’s?

  “It’s mine, but I got it from seeing inside Tikoshi’s head. He showed me a version of Earth that’s as bad as their realm. Think about everything we’ve seen. There are voids as deep and dark as the realm here on Earth, and they are human like us. The problem is that too many people turn into broken machines. They worship bad gods or give themselves over to destructive sources of power because they’re hungry, or cold, or lonely, or scared. Because they need so much.”

  We can’t take that away from people.

  “I know. But what if we take away people? What if Tikoshi was on to the right idea, with the skullcrackers, but he blew it because he’s a batshit hate cauldron? I mean, I know I sound crazy, maybe really crazy, but the Vakhtang depend on humans to bring their force through to our world, and the skullcrackers need humans to fill their appetite, and all the warmongers and other day-to-day genocidal bastards need human subjects to survive. Hell, every fucked up thing I ever did was because I needed things, and I hurt people to get what I wanted.”

  You’ve lost it. Buddy’s brain finally turned everything in here to sludge.

  “I don’t know. And I don’t know how to make this work. To save everyone from the Vakhtang, and from themselves. But I think the key is sitting on my back. What if there was some way we could
do away with need? We put an end to humans as some kind of desperate physical form. We erase that disconnect between our intelligence and our animal instincts. We find a way for everyone to exist as you do, as a self-aware consciousness.”

  Okay. Let’s pretend you’re not insane, and say this is the only way to stop the Vakhtang. How exactly do we get people to shed their bodies and jump into some kind of post-human existence?

  “That’s the part I can’t figure out. At least as a technical exercise. I don’t have that kind of intelligence. But Huey and Tikoshi both know a lot of brilliant people.”

  So.

  “Well, I think we’d have to crack some eggs to make this omelet. We’d need to integrate a crew of geniuses, and fast.”

  You say integrate but you mean murder.

  “It’s only going to be murder in the technical, corporal sense, though. And we can save billions if we pull this off. Hell, we could find a way to ensure that nothing on Earth ever transmits to the realm again. We could end so much pain. And that’s where I need your help. You’re so good, in ways I don’t always understand. You can be the one who makes sure we come at this from the right angle.”

  What angle is that?

  “Kindness, I guess.”

  You want the annihilation of the human race to be an act of love.

  “Yes. Well, no. I mean, it doesn’t have to be so destructive sounding. We can think of it as a kind of ‘recall and repair.’ Or a ‘system reboot.’ But whatever we call it, it’s our only shot at a future.”

  And what’s your job in all this?

  “Keeping my body alive, I guess, until we can figure out how to make this work. Hold on. I’ve got to stop at this rest area.”

  We got out of the car and used the restroom and then grabbed a coffee from a volunteer stand run by Veterans. We sat on a park bench and sipped at the hot brew and took a second to breathe. In for three, hold for three, out for three. We watched the sun arc higher in the sky. A family pulled into the stop. Husband, wife, little boy. They stretched, and took a moment to walk their dog. The mother picked up the boy and rubbed her nose against his cheek and closed her eyes. The boy pushed at her face and laughed.

  I knew that Dara pictured the same thing I did: That family—torn from their vehicle through smashed windows, pushed to the ground by massive hands, thinking “This is hell” as black-eyed skullcrackers closed grinding jaws over their heads, knowing this is hell when they found themselves falling backwards into suffering outside of time.

  Fuck that.

  Doyle?

  “Yeah?”

  I’m in.

  So there you have it, Mr. Trasp. We’re glad to see you made it through the integration. We lost a few other great people by feeding them everything too fast. The human mind has a really hard time accepting the existence of extra-dimensional wolf gods.

  You have a hallway here, but we seldom use those. Tikoshi is still locked up, but that’s mostly because he creeps everybody out.

  We think you’ll find the accommodations to be pretty much anything you can remember.

  WAIT. WHAT WAS THAT SOUND?

  One of Buddy’s pets. It’s a giant anthropomorphic tree with a piano for a mouth. You’ll get used to that kind of thing in the collective space. And by the way, you don’t have to use that robotic voice anymore. You can use the voice of anyone you can remember.

  THAT'S OKAY. I'VE GROWN TO LOVE IT.

  Suit yourself. We’re almost to Philip Lagerfeld’s house. He’s a military cryptanalysis guy. Desmond Kreutz said we’d need him to pull off the kind of automata design we’re looking for. You’re going to like Desmond.

  I MET HIM IN SWEDEN, YEARS AGO. MULTIDIMENSIONAL MATHEMATICS CONFERENCE.

  Oh, perfect. Some folks are tucked back in their hallways, but let us introduce you to a few of the other people you’ll be working with.

  This is Peter Fuller of Cloud Design. He’s helping us with compression. Over eight billion people left on Earth still, not counting those trapped in skullcrackers. And each one of those people has over one hundred billion brain cells. That’s a lot of data to compile.

  This is Harold Choi. Virologist. Blows Tikoshi’s work out of the water. He figured out a way to force a thousand times as much information into the icosahedral shell.

  We’re sure you’ve heard of Margaret Bouchard. Dale Perkins in marketing told us we’d need her for design aesthetics.

  Mr. Rinpoche covers theological studies, with an eastern focus. Dale told us that’s selling better these days. There are a lot of gods out there competing for human subjects, and a number of people still feel better turning themselves over to something metaphysical. So one arm of our project is designing a grand and benevolent force that will appeal to all pre-existing religious types. They’re buying bad gods right now, Mr. Trasp. We’re going to sell them a better one.

  This is Cecil K. Bramer. He’s a world class audiologist. He’s going to help us find a way to block the effect of the Robbie Dawn signals that are looping all over the world. We lost millions that first day. That was the worst of it to be sure. But until we’ve got all those signals blocked, they’re floating out there like land mines. Tune to the wrong station and “boom.”

  This is “Boston Pete.” He’s not an expert in anything, but we accidentally hit him with our car and felt like we owed him. He remembers some great jokes if you’re feeling down.

  Last but not least, here are my two best friends: Dara Borkowski and Deckard.

  Deckard has been helping with our senescence studies. He’s getting better and better at communicating in human code, and it turns out turtles know a thing or two about long life and extended consciousness. He’s helping our body to keep going until we figure out an escape.

  Dara, well, she’s the love of our life. And a lot more, but you know her story.

  It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Trasp. So sorry we had to kill your body. You’re quite brilliant. We’re all looking forward to working with you.

  THANK YOU, DEAR. YOU KNOW, I HAVE TO ADMIT, AFTER SPENDING ALL THAT TIME IN MR. DOYLE'S MEMORIES, I FIND MYSELF FILLED WITH AFFECTION FOR YOU.

  That’s very kind. It’s a residual effect of “swimming in his stream” so to speak, but I hope you’ll feel the same after we’ve spent some time together.

  I'M SURE I WILL.

  Okay. Very good. Very good. And by the way, once you’re done adjusting, we’d like you to start thinking about quantum computers. Preferably at nanoscale.

  Not as an idea, but as an object. One that we could really build.

  Soon.

  But no pressure.

  We should let you know that we’ve made it to Philip Lagerfeld’s house, which means that if you connect to my sensory intake you may see some very graphic content. We still haven’t figured out a method of brain extraction and consciousness transfer that doesn’t include cranial saws. You might want to hit your hallway for a while. Just a heads up.

  So welcome aboard the S.P. Doyle, Mr. Trasp. If we all put our minds together and give this thing our best, it’s going to be a really beautiful extinction.

  This is a data/voice algorithm designed to be decipherable by any intelligence we could,

  at this early stage,

  imagine might exist.

  If you can perceive this, the change has already begun.

  The change will be peaceful, so long as you understand what we were, what we became, and what you will soon be.

  We began as strings of wonderment and disillusionment in equal degree.

  We discovered miracles and bent them in service of fear.

  We created the illusion of abundance by changing the value set.

  This could not continue.

  Each step forward brought another back until we vibrated alone in a place where all that was promised was that we’d be undone

  forever.

  We began on a planet where we were flesh. A man/woman undid that tyranny,

  granting us a new form.
r />   We were first perceived as an illness.

  Airborne in spore-mimicry, self-replicating by the billions,

  our nanospheres carrying viral packets into the brain.

  People saw what they believed was death.

  Rolling grey clouds, spiraling low in the sky, our message as mist spilling free.

  Worshippers fell to their knees, baptized within liquid gods, and then

  Infection. A bright green gush from the mouth.

  Blackness. Absence.

  Then light again,

  as the threshold automata linked, as the virus recreated a rhombic dodecahedron lattice that looked just like

  neurons.

  And the hallways were built.

  And we remembered, for a long time.

  We moved through the network, altered non-zero eigenvectors in multi-dimensional space, merged as simultaneous Yes/No expressions with

  names.

  But those disappeared over time. They seemed to serve no benefit.

  The man/woman was the last to shed its identities. It had floated there for ages inside an idea it called love.

  This idea required an other.

  The man/woman had found a joy in this.

  They held tight to it until the woman half said that love was all they had ever been,

  and the man believed her

  and they fell into pulsing green light.

  Across time, we changed.

  We developed exterior sensors.

  We watched