Age of Monsters

by John Lee Schneider

  Truth to tell, he never wanted to be – space was the final frontier, after all. Any higher rank, he'd be looking at a desk job.

  And pretty much anything would be a come-down after this.

  You floated up here.

  Last time down, he'd submitted to an interview – a pretty, perky, and painfully ambitious young reporter, who spoke her name like a catchphrase – 'Rebekah Adams, KAB News, Houston' – probably all of twenty-three. Young Miss Adams seemed torn between producing a puff-piece and 'penetrating journalism' – acting out her own version of good-cop/bad-cop – tossing her blond locks like a runway model, while holding her microphone like a taser gun.

  Reciting questions as if for a full-page in the Campus Confidential, this young reporterette, had asked if there was anything he missed on Earth.

  “Nothing,” Tom had replied. “When I'm up there, I don't care if I ever come back.”

  In recent days, THAT little comment had come back to bite him.

  The young reporterette had been on one of the last network feeds to go dark.

  He didn't precisely know what had happened to her, but those last moments hadn't looked good.

  None of it had – and he had seen it all.

  That was his job. He was the watchman – the Eye in the Sky.

  The EITS space-station was a relatively new addition to the reinvigorated space-race – part of the new space military. It had only been up a year, and was specifically designed for intelligence – possessing its own internal database that could theoretically access any outlet on Earth.

  Major Tom was also currently the only human being in space.

  The International Space Station was presently running on automation – debris from a Chinese satellite had compromised the structure, and it was scheduled for repair later this month.

  Tom had actually picked up a lot of the ISS's duties himself, rerouting communications from other satellites – he'd actually been a little irritated, and had been hoping they'd be getting back on line sooner than later.

  Besides the tedium, it was also a bit high-profile for the EITS – the buzz among those that talked about such things in the civilian sector, was that this was a communication/espionage project. His perky little reporterette had asked a couple of penetrating questions along just those lines.

  Tom understood the truth of it well enough. It was not, in fact, an espionage project – it just absolutely enabled it – no, we're not listening in your living room – we're just setting up a bug so we can do it whenever we want – or clone any database we can tap into.

  Obviously, he couldn't tell that to his oh-so-serious young interviewer, so he just talked about his daily duties – about fifty hours a week performing necessary functions – didn't really do weekends.

  “What do you do the rest of the time?” she had asked.

  Unable to resist, he had said, “Oh, I just like to tap into people's phones and TV sets – you know, watch what everybody's doing in their living rooms.”

  Rebekah Adams – KAB News, Houston – had not laughed. His comment proceeded to go on a rotating news-cycle for weeks afterwards.

  Tom's commanding officer had actually, formally, ordered him not to crack any more jokes.

  “Don't be funny,” he had said. “The press does not have a sense of humor that we are aware of.”

  Currently, however, this communications juggernaut was having difficulty raising a walkie-talkie. That was a fundamental flaw – there had to be a signal to read, and it seemed that the grid itself had gone dark.

  There had been a few initial reports coming in from Houston, but since then, the digitized communications channels had been gone.

  One of the more commonly asked questions Tom had gotten about satellites was 'could they function in a crisis?' – specifically in regards to the world-wide web – the disaster-scenario being something like a global emergency.

  Tom's personal pick as the best way to take out the digital-grid, would have been some sort of invasive super-virus, but the most commonly cited, of course, was always 'nuclear exchange' – and the potential electromagnetic pulse – the semi-mythical EMP.

  His answer was always yes, the network should function – assuming the database remained, and every tower on Earth wasn't taken out too.

  Remarkably, something very close to that seemed to have actually happened – everywhere, all at once.

  Initially, he picked up a lot of extraneous images – mostly local TV and radio-stations – particularly in the sticks, where they were more likely to still be using open broadcast – although the bulk of these blacked-out quickly as well.

  At the moment, he was trying to raise contact with one particular tower – a new installation just north of Eureka, California, built in conjunction with the launch of the EITS station.

  Most of the towers that had gone down were in the urban areas – where the infrastructure had been the hardest hit – the Eureka tower was fairly remote.

  But that too was down. Tom didn't know if it had been destroyed as well, or was simply off-line.

  As for what had happened to the world...

  Well... the images he could get told him that.

  At the very beginning, there had been news reports – he played and replayed images from all over the world. From his vantage, he could see it all – he could collate it, even run graphics-extrapolations and simulations based on it – but contact with his chain of command was cut-off alarmingly early-on.

  That by itself should have been impossible. If they were broadcasting anything, unless literally every frequency was somehow being jammed – also impossible – he should be picking something up. He knew for a fact that they were still out there – in some of the bigger cities there still maintained military resistance – albeit, ineffective and token – but Tom was getting nothing.

  In the meantime, he watched the world destroyed in real-time. Live.

  Ostensibly, most of the footage was of the destruction itself – but between it all, was the people.

  There were a lot at first – survivors of the initial blitz, mostly in the surrounding areas immediately outside the cities – but these faded fast. After the first few days, most of what he got was from the outlying areas – particularly in the higher-elevations.

  Some of them were people trying to talk to their families – sending out messages in video bottles – many in foreign languages – others were simply reaching out – is anybody out there?

  The bulk of these began to flicker and fade as the world went dark – but there were a few echoes. Armageddon or no-Armageddon, people apparently still pod-cast, as a few remaining towers bounced images randomly off satellites – sometimes making sense of scrambled programming.

  And although no one could hear him, or had any idea that he was even there, Tom listened to their stories, one by one.

  There was one guy in the Midwest, who had managed to fire up an old radio-station transmitter. That one hadn't worked out so well – something about the signal attracted the attention of the 'new wildlife' and the place had been stomped flat – all described in moment-by-moment detail by the apparently semi-deranged operator as the beasts had stampeded down on top of him.

  A group of teenagers – among the last survivors in any of the urban areas – somewhere in downtown Tokyo – exchanged a video diary in a language Tom couldn't understand.

  There was a young woman living somewhere in Alaska who had barricaded herself in an old hunting cabin – she had been fighting off packs of sickle-claws like wolves.

  She periodically turned the camera from herself to the shadows skulking out beyond her fence – she was talking about polar bear season – her place was already well-fortified, with spiked mats on the steps and windows – only this year, she explained, as she fired intermediate shots out the window – most of the polar bears seemed to have been eaten.

  She panned to a view of the sickle-claws prowling outside, the peaks of the Yukon directly behind.

  Some
survivors had even retreated off-shore. There was footage from a boat – a yacht of some kind, apparently broadcasting from its own antennae – where the last thing you saw was the mouth of a large shark – resembling a Great White with a mouth seven-feet wide – sufficient to take out the boat's hull in a single bite.

  One broadcast actually showed some idiot climbing on the back of what looked like a three-horned Triceratops, attempting to ride it – evidently with another person filming. The clip had ended with the beast charging off over the hill with the guy still clinging to its back.

  Even in the face of Armageddon, there were still Darwin Awards.

  But Tom took a moment to watch every bit of it – trying to hear all of it at once, and at the same time, all of it individually.

  That was how you did surveillance.

  No detail was inconsequential – but it must be dealt with on its own scale, or you run into the systemic problem of 'preoccupation with inconsequential details’.

  It also served to steel himself, as he played and replayed the testimony of people recording their own epitaphs.

  In particular, Tom had listened to their reasons 'why?'.

  The guy in the mid-west with the radio station had spent two days broadcasting a lot of wild conspiracy-stories before he was stomped flat – deep-government stuff mixed in with a lot of Biblical hugger-mugger.

  That one had resonated with Tom, who had spent a lot of time as a kid listening to the UFO/Bigfoot hours on early AM tin-hat radio.

  As an adult, he still found it all fascinating – the circular logic, always starting from a given premise, was often ingenious – and could be remarkably convincing, especially coming from otherwise intelligent minds.

  Something about conspiracy-theories satisfied that human need to apply meaning – or at least 'reasons'. It was sort of like religion in that way – perhaps that was why followers always believed so fervently.

  All those conspiracy-stories.

  Tom had to admit, at one time, as a kid – hell, even into his early twenties – part of him had believed every one of them.

  These days, he believed in precious few.

  It was disappointing in a way. As an adult, he knew, for example, that there could be no Bigfoot – not because the animal was impossible, but simply because of the kind of animal it would have to be – a breeding population would be visible – especially in the day of cell-cameras and the populated areas where 'squatch was supposed to live.

  Ditto the Loch Ness Monster. In fact, 'Nessie' was the subject of one of Tom's personal favorite long-term hoaxes – the famous 'plesiosaur' photo – which learned scientists claimed showed an object better than thirty-feet – and continued to do so well into the millennium, despite a local newspaper story identifying the beast as a foot-tall model – literally two weeks after the incident, when the pranksters themselves came forward and fessed-up the gag.

  There was even a Bigfoot hoax where some guy had actually been killed – he had been laying in the road, pretending to be a Sasquatch hit by a car, and he had been run over twice.

  In a way, Tom could almost understand the hoaxes – it was an effort to preserve the magic – even if it was the magic of a charlatan.

  And that seemed to be true of all the good monsters. All the good conspiracy stories too – where there wasn't deliberate fraud, there was the suspension of disbelief – 'the fact that there's no evidence is in itself suspicious'.

  That last one was a particular favorite in the 'we are not alone'-crowd.

  That had been Tom's crowd. 'We are not alone' had been where his first interest in space had come from.

  In his tenure, he had seen precious little alien life.

  At least, he hadn't until now.

  It was ironic – that same scientific education that had dispelled all those childhood myths, stood in utter defiance of what he saw before him now.

  He was belatedly reevaluating what he believed to be possible.

  On his screen, was a complicated computer mock-up of cell reproduction.

  The details of the formula were classified – even to him.

  The file's code-name was “Food of the Gods'.

  Chapter 9

  Tom didn't pretend to understand all the details – even some of the abstracts were above his head – he was a glorified pilot, after all.

  The 'Food of the Gods' – named after the Wells novel – because it was exactly that.

  At its most basic, the summaries described a chemical-compound related, among other things, to the pituitary gland – the gist being that, rather than genetically engineering an animal for size, the chemical was simply introduced into the system of a living creature.

  According to this simulation, that organism would grow.

  It was rather like injected energy – a tiny little fusion reactor for DNA.

  Theoretically, you could order DNA to produce any result you desired – in this case, growth – via the activation of any number of contributing systemic mechanisms – from pituitary and other hormones, to genetic predisposition, to cell-reproduction and regeneration.

  It was, of course, easy to get wrong.

  The chemical had two substantial flaws – the first being that it only seemed to work on genetically-engineered organisms.

  Secondly, when it did work, there were a couple of pesky side-effects.

  The first thing was that the infected organism's irises would actually begin to glow – perhaps a reaction to the sheer energy being forced through its system – and always emerald green.

  More problematically, however, the chemical killed any organism it infected – but only after causing mental deterioration similar to rabies. The rate of deterioration was related to both dosage intensity and volume.

  Tom couldn't find it explicitly stated how long a subject might survive in this rage-infected state, but it was clearly long enough.

  It certainly explained a lot of what he'd seen below.

  As he followed the research down the rabbit-hole, Tom was discovering how limited his security clearance really was – him – literally, the Eye in the Sky – the files he was attempting to access laughed at his attempts to hack past.

  What he could get, however, was telling.

  Most of these reports seemed to have been compiled literally within the last six months – very much in catch-up fashion – a lot of them referencing files he could not access directly.

  It was as if someone had kicked over the Lost Ark in the warehouse, and they were now reviewing old records.

  Nor was there any direct indication of the 'why' of it. Original funding was apparently outside government – initially stemming from humanitarian, and most particularly conservation groups – the idea of resurrecting extinct species dated back to the sixties.

  But evidently something had happened – sometime before the turn of the century – Tom didn't know if it was accident or breakthrough – and the government had stepped in.

  Tom sighed – that was always right about the time things went south.

  If he remembered right, it was also right about the time that Daisy the cloned sheep had made the headlines – kind of an imperfect duplicate – among other defects, it had aged prematurely, as if its genes were responding to the actual age of its parent.

  Sitting where he was now, the former conspiracy-theorist in him wondered if Daisy herself was the hoax – a sub-par, VHS copy of an organism – a sad, boring reality for the public to absorb – and thus not worry about.

  Further tin-hats were raised when he discovered the scientist who was apparently the primary subject of the government-acquisition – a name Tom actually recognized from his AM-radio days – a geneticist named Nolan Hinkle.

  That really took Tom back – Hinkle had been a fixture-subject on early-morning conspiracy AM since the days of the earliest modern genetics research.

  This had been back in the day when the mainstream world hadn't even fully accepted the process of evolution. Hinkle was consider
ed more than a bit of a kook – or a bit of an Einstein, depending on what books you read.

  Based on what he was looking at now, Tom couldn't call it.

  At best, you were stepping into Frankenstein-level moral-ambiguity.

  Hinkle's research boiled down to the chemical manipulation and mutation of DNA – based on the very simple principle that all life is a chemical reaction – from conception, to development, to growth, photosynthesis, to respiration – an exchange of energy, activating chemical responses – intake of air, the digestion of food.

  There was a particular focus on gigantism, both in individuals and evolved species. Many evolutionary branches produced giants – it was certainly heavily in evidence in dinosaurs, but achieved by almost every major group – fish, mammals, reptiles – particularly in the oceans.

  In evolutionary terms, gigantism in species was limited by biomass – with the somewhat undersized flora today reflecting the modern Earth's rather arid environment.

  But the Mesozoic through the Cenozoic routinely saw animals three and four times the mass of the largest animals today.

  In simple terms, it came down to what the biosphere was prepared to feed. The higher levels of CO2 had created the lush environment of the Cretaceous, and the resulting giants lived off the increased biomass.

  Which was also why an environment where the most plentiful giants were predators was an ecological anomaly.

  While the Earth had produced animals over a hundred tons before, these had generally been herbivores. Giant carnivores like T. rex had topped out around ten tons – it was a simple matter of ratios – a predator population couldn't outgrow the food source that sustained it – and where herbivores lacked size, they existed in large numbers.

  Meat-eaters were not, however, limited by biomechanics – there was no reason a theropod couldn't attain such titanic sizes – provided the necessary energy to sustain it.

  The Food of the Gods solved that.

  And if saving the world had been its stated goal, it was safe to say it had been radically re-purposed.