*
The heavy roar of rain was the first thing Barsch heard upon waking, the second was Kingston’s cheery, “Good morning”, as he walked into the kitchen. Barsch had spent most of the previous day preparing the cottage for the storm, and so, when he asked Kingston how he could be useful, he received an unexpected reply.
“Well, the chores are all taken care of, so why don’t you take your time and relax?” the old man had said, while handing Barsch his porridge. Following his advice, Barsch had tried to let his mind wander. And after checking up on the still sleeping girl, Barsch retreated to the study, where he busied himself by cleaning up the scattered books.
Soon, he had managed to slot almost every book into its rightful place in the bookshelves, and he was free to actually read one. While he had been cleaning, several interesting titles had caught his eye, such as: “The Inner-Cognitive Dissonance and its Effects on History”; “Gravity Well Generators and You” and “Quantum Mechanics: A Collection of Bedtime Quantitative Arguments”, but only one had truly stood out.
A few minutes of searching later, and he had found the book, with its dark red cover bearing the image of a smokestack. The title, written in elaborate, cursive script, was “Over-Pollution: A Brief History of our Greatest Folly”. It had been written by Doctor S. Mendel, a prominent scientist and ecology expert who had lived before the Great Sleep. Opening the tome, Barsch scanned the index, before settling on a chapter titled “The Creed Event”. Turning to the section, Barsch saw that it had been largely copied and pasted from the personal diary of the author:
Day 13: It has been almost two weeks since this expedition began, and today, we finally found what we came here for. While exploring the nearby cave system, Goat came across a partially sealed chamber containing hitherto unbelievable levels of pollution. It seems to have come from the nearby re-mech factory, obviously slowly building up over a number of years.
Thankfully, it is still in crystalline form, but we have decided to erect a containment field in order to prevent any more leakages. If this much pollution ever made it to the surface, it could start a chain reaction, the scope of which I cannot even comprehend. Due to the high levels of background radiation, I have chosen to only send in the most senior members of my team.
I have asked Mr Simmons, one of the interns, to check on the containment seals before handing them over to Goat. While Mr Simmons has not been with us long, I am comfortable that he can carry out his tasks with the utmost care. Of course, he will still be required to check the charge on the field generators, and prepare the food, and iron my suit, and refuel the re-mechs, and file the reports…
The nearby town of Creed has been kind enough to let us use one of their farms as a base of operations. I should remind Simmons to write them a thank you letter.
Day 15: I awoke this morning to a horrendous noise, one that I doubt I will ever be able to forget. It was the sound of an explosion, but one louder and longer than I have ever heard before, and it came from the direction of the caves. Leaving my quarters, I was greeted by a most vile sight: a massive plume of violet gas, arising from the work site.
Immediately I tried to contact Goat, whom I had placed in charge of the containment field, and was rewarded with only static. Moments later, a dishevelled figure emerged from the forest, calling out for help. Upon reaching him, we discovered that he was none other than Mr Simmons, who had been assigned as Goat’s personal aide. He was covered in soot and burns, and it took several precious minutes to calm him down.
The moment the shock faded, he told us what had happened. Goat had been working on optimising the containment field generator, when it had suddenly exploded, killing him instantly and severely wounding three people. The explosion had blown a hole in the cave ceiling, allowing the trapped pollution to rush skyward, and creating the chain reaction I had so feared.
Coming into contact with the upper atmosphere slipstream, the dispersal of the pollution had been accelerated, and dozens of new points of consolidation had formed where new pollution met old. These “Origin Points” had then started multiplying, quickly moving away from our position.
Only Simmons had been able to escape from the work site relatively unharmed, due to being on the opposite side of the camp. Curious, I asked him about the soot and burns, to which he replied that he had been injured while trying to rescue the trapped workers. However, their injuries were fatal, and they had asked Mr Simmons to leave them and get help.
As soon as he finished recounting what had happened, I had Mr Simmons taken to the infirmary, while I contacted my superiors to tell them of the incident. Unfortunately, they had already found out, and had initiated a Level Five Alert, as well as order a wide-scale evacuation of the capital.
While I was pondering what course of action I should take, a second, slightly smaller explosion was heard from the work site. I would later learn that the remnants of the generator had exploded, incinerating the survivors and destroying any evidence of the camp.
At the time, however, my attention was diverted by the latest update from the First Line sensors around the capital: twenty-seven Origin Points were forming around the largest city on the planet, and somehow, I just knew… there would be no survivors…
Awakening Page 13