The Conspiracy Chronicles Boxset 2

by Michael Evans

  “Hold on!” I yell back. My voice echoes as it carries across the wasteland. The nanobots have now cleared up practically all the smoke within a mile radius, and the view of the destruction is mind-blowing in all the wrong ways. I am the singular person in sight standing up and walking around. Virtually every one of the millions of people living in Hong Kong Island is dead or about to die.

  Some buildings didn’t completely fall in the explosions. Instead, the ones further from the epicenter of the blasts have all their windows shattered and their first few floors still standing. The remaining floors of the skyscrapers are toppled over on top of the layers of rubble, looking like dead trees in the aftermath of a forest fire except a hundred times larger and with thousands of living humans inside them (so maybe nothing at all like a tree, but you get my metaphor).

  I hold the detection tool of the Chimera Cube against the cement block on top of the woman. It is designed to detect the specific chemical makeup of the material so that when I deliver my next command, the Chimera Cube doesn’t accidentally eliminate the wrong object.

  The screen on the wand-like tool lights up, listing off a bunch of chemical formulas that detail exactly what the structure is made of. At this point I have a few options: I can choose to create more of that very same material, I can turn this machine off, or I can command the Chimera Cube to convert all the atoms that compose the specific structure the wand is touching into water vapor.

  I choose the latter.

  A similar rush of adrenaline overcomes me as it did the first time I tried this command out in the woods of Tibet. Somehow, turning a several-hundred-pound chunk of cement into gas is as satisfying at vaporizing an entire tree.

  I drop the wand to the ground as the cement, for a lack of better words, disappears into thin air. The woman being crushed underneath it and with her head sandwiched to a broken dining room table now has room to breathe. I jump down into the tiny crevice in the rubble and place my hand on the Chimera Cube. Then, before she can yell in protest or grab me to help save her, I do the one thing that will fix her bleeding legs up in a second.

  I command the Chimera Cube to heal her, and as fast as the cement disappears, her swollen, dismembered legs are patched up as the look of terror on her face turns to one of shock.

  “What just happened?” She puts a hand on her once bleeding leg, the flesh from a piece of wood splintering in her leg still stuck to her jeans. She has brunette hair and thick eyebrows that look as if they have collected all the ash in the air. From the looks of her, she seems to be of foreign descent, likely Eastern European, one of the only ones left in any territory of China after the increasing xenophobia.

  “You’re safe.” I smile. The sensation of being able to wash someone’s ailments away with the snap of a finger is one that never gets old. “I would take credit for it, but I promise you I had nothing to do with that.”

  “What do you mean?” she asks, backing away from me in the mini crater that exists where the cement chunk used to lie.

  “I would explain in full, but I have a world to save. Okay, that sounds a bit dramatic, but you get my point.” I bend over and pick the wand up off the ground, the screaming and groaning of the living growing to a new level. Every second I don’t save someone is a second closer to us all dying.

  “Who even are you?” She frantically looks around and then up at the sky, where the smoke surrounding the area that the nanobots from the Chimera Cube cleared is now seeping into the clean air. Soon this entire city will be swathed in smoke again. It will take weeks for this all to go away, and with this magnitude of disaster, it is a chore even for the Chimera Cube to clean up.

  “I’m Sam,” I respond, realizing that is the most unofficial title for someone who is dressed from head to toe in a hazmat suit with only the color of my eyes visible to her. “My name doesn’t matter, though. All you need to know is that the Chinese government is aiming to kill every last person in Hong Kong. And if we don’t free everyone from this rubble and get out of here as soon as possible, we won’t have much to talk about.”

  “You sound—”

  “Take this.” I interrupt her and hand her the wand. “I need help. Just point the red tip on the end at an object you want to destroy and press the button on the thing that says vaporize.”

  “What does that do?” She looks at me like I am crazy, and it’s not like I can blame her. From the look of the business attire she has on and the weathered circles underneath her eyes, she is likely yet another overworked and under rewarded office worker in the former financial capital of the east.

  “You’ll see.” I grit my teeth together as I focus on moving to the next person. I have no plan whatsoever about how we are supposed to get out of this and save everyone still living in this city, but as my brain settles into its surroundings, my anxiety only grows. “Get moving or you’ll end up like the bodies beneath us.”

  My hard words force her into action. When she witnesses the power of the wand in her hands, her reaction is nothing short of disbelief.

  I urge her to continue and command the cube to make another detector tool so that I can do the same. Within a minute we hit another body in the rubble. Unlike her own, this body isn’t alive when the cement block is vaporized on top of it. The face is smashed to the size of a pancake and every bone in the body is flattened by the weight of the chunk of building above it. The moment the cement is vaporized, a shower of glass rains down on the body as more debris falls on top of it.

  We are in the middle of a minefield. As soon as we vaporize one object, a million more shift around as the thousands of pieces of trash, rubble, and furniture form the headstones of the mass graveyard.

  It doesn’t take long for us to reach another person. We have burrowed our own pathway through the rubble, the screams growing louder as we close in on a group of children trapped in pods that are covered in glass and glowing. At first I wonder if we have found the remnants of a child daycare facility gone horribly wrong, but then I realize that the pods are nothing more than the micro-size housing these kids live in.

  I free them all, each and every one of them virtually unscathed. I make five detector tools, handing one to each of them. Now, I know what you’re thinking. It is terribly irresponsible of me to give these things to kids. I completely agree. In fact, as I hand the things over to them, my hands can’t help but shake within the hazmat suit. They all talk at once, their words impossible for me to understand due to the fact that I don’t speak Mandarin, but from the expressions on their faces, it is obvious that their emotions range from distress, to fear, to confusion.

  When one of them finally figures out what the detector tools are capable of, they all freak out. They point their fingers at me, one screaming at me, likely thinking that I am an evil witch. A decade ago, my eight-year-old self would feel crippled by the insults of these kids, but they are the least of my worries now.

  I don’t care if these kids press the wrong button a few times. All I need is five hyperactive seven-year-old kids running about this city, helping to free people from the rubble.

  I smile as I watch them destroy the rubble around us with the touch of a finger, one on accident duplicating a shattered bathtub with the power of the wand, which only causes them to press the button to vaporize it.

  Then my strategy unfolds.

  I now have my army.

  Hundreds, even thousands of people roaming throughout this city freeing people from the rubble, using the power of the nanofabrication system inside each tool specifically designed to mimic and break down compounds to save the lives of hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions in hours. I command the Chimera Cube to create dozens of hazmat suits of varying sizes and hand them to each person in my army.

  No one needs any direction. They all know to put them on, it’s not like the deadly effects of radiation hide themselves from anyone. Then we march on.

  I find myself spitting commands into the Chimera Cube nearly every second. One moment I comman
d it to heal a person freshly freed from the rubble while another I command it to make a dozen detector tools. I use my own detector tool to dig deep down into the bottom of the rubble.

  What I find is nothing short of nightmarishly disturbing. A family of bodies crushed underneath the rubble, their lives long from being salvageable. To get to the streets beneath the city, I have to dig almost twenty feet into the rubble, my detector tool having to eliminate various pieces of furniture, clothes, and even a statue in the process.

  Now that I know how deep this destruction runs, I know just how far we have to go. We have an entire ocean of debris to clean up. We need every single person in Hong Kong fighting to clear the rubble and rebuild this city.

  That’s exactly what happens, or at least what starts to happen.

  The small group of about ten of us grows into thirty and then one hundred as people are continuously freed from the rubble and then healed by the Chimera Cube. Once their lives are intact again, everyone doesn’t immediately pick up a weird-looking wand and get to joining the mass of people around them trying to vaporize what is left in the city.

  Instead, most scream and cry, many having full-on panic attacks as they try to come to terms with what is in front of us. Humans are creatures of survival. We are meant for moments like this, when our life is on the line and the lives of the people around us. But we are not programmed to witness this much death. We aren’t programmed to experiences horrors this intense—frankly, my mind will never be able to fathom this.

  Despite this, there are enough people who rise to the occasion to make the progress exponential. After thirty minutes of doing nothing but healing people with the cube while running across the rubble as the obstacles in my way are being cleared in real time, the army has grown to several hundred.

  I am out of breath, sweat has made the entire bullet-proof suit I am wearing damp, yet I have never felt more alive. Temporarily, the weight of the destruction and pressure of the whole world resting on my shoulders is absent. All that matters is seeing another expression of shock on someone’s face as they see their body transform from one that is bleeding out and on the verge of death to one that looks and feels new again.

  Even the fact that for every person I find alive and ready to be saved by the Chimera Cube there are ten more that are dead isn’t one that slows me down. The only thing that matters to me is getting the army of people cheering and screaming with excitement to grow larger until the government can’t do a thing about us.

  Time melts away as the seconds bleed into minutes and I realize that my jaw is sore from uttering the same command at the Chimera Cube thousands of times. If I could keep track of all the people that have been freed from the rubble, I would. But with hundreds of thousands of square feet of the city now devoid of rubble, the only thing that remains are the thousands more bodies that lie dead on the streets, their blood permanently singed into the ground.

  Looking at all the bodies makes my eyes water and stomach turn as I hold back a round of hot vomit from spewing out of me. I’d rather focus on the thousands of living people that have been saved by the Chimera Cube and the same people that are going to save tens of thousands more.

  But I know it will only take a second for us all to end up exactly like the bodies beneath us.

  That’s why I intentionally clear the smoke in the area around us as the heavy dark gases seep back in, but I don’t try and clear all the ash and smoke from the fallout. If I deliberately try and clear the airspace around Hong Kong, I will be making us all sitting ducks for the Chinese military to bomb us again.

  They have to think that we aren’t here.

  They have to think we are all dead until the clouds recede and a new skyline of Hong Kong rises.

  That is the plan at least, the plan that has evolved in my mind over the most stressful few minutes of my life. But the plan goes to shit before I can erect any new skyscrapers in the cleared sections of rubble or build a large, indestructible cruise ship to carry the people away in.

  At first, I hear the screams.

  Then I hear the gunshots.

  The smoke in the airspace of Hong Kong will make carrying out any operation from the sky impossible for days. But that doesn’t stop anyone from invading what is left of this city on land.

  When I see who is invading, even I am a bit surprised.

  It’s the Chinese imperial army.

  Thousands of soldiers have entered the edge of the smoke clearing, their footsteps booming across the rubble and shaking the earth itself. The soldiers aren’t human, though. Even from afar, I know the glow in their eyes and rigid body structure.

  Each soldier in the army is a clone of President Li.

  And they are here to kill us.

  Chapter 19

  I take back what I said earlier about the rubble being the most horrific sight I have ever seen.

  President Li won that competition yet again.

  At first no one seems to know how to react. I tap the Chimera Cube, healing a person’s wounds who was formerly trapped underneath a car.

  When I hear the gunshots, I immediately run towards them, using the detector tool in my hand to blaze a path through the rubble back to the surface. There must be at least several thousand clones of Li Wang. All have the same bright, traditional Uyghur silk robes draped over their naked bodies. Each robe is bright red, the pigment easily discernible from the smoke.

  Besides the haunting glow in the eyes of all the clones of Li Wang stampeding across the rubble towards us, they look nothing like the Li that I remember. They all have long, gray, bushy beards. The kind that clean-shaven people like me aren’t surprised if crumbs get trapped in for months. Each clone is also wearing a small cap with four corners, each cap the same bright red color as their robes but with yellow dots all around it. The rest of their facial features are hard to analyze from about a thousand feet away, but at the lurid pace they are moving forward, there is no doubt I will get a close-up of the new breed of clones of Li Wang in seconds.

  This is insane. I place my hand on the Chimera Cube, my mind switching gears as I switch my mission from saving everyone here to instead killing the thousands of clones that are trampling over the rubble at the same rate a pack of cheetahs pursues its prey in the wild.

  However, their bullets don’t take any time to catch up with the crowd of thousands of people that have now been saved from the rubble. They all have machine guns, probably with unlimited amounts of ammo strapped to them, and they are not shy about letting it loose on us.

  The cacophonous noise of thousands of bullets being fired into the crowd every second all morphs into a singular sound that tears apart my ear drums. The sound doesn’t even match the intensity of the screams as the bullets tear through the bodies of the people I saved. Although most of the bullets are inaccurate, the sheer number of rounds being fired in our direction forms a wave of destruction that takes out everything in its path.

  I wish I could tell you how many people died in the first second, but numbers to quantify tragedies like these are pointless. I can’t let another person die.

  “Force field of maximum size.” I command the Chimera Cube and double-tap it as soon as it lights up. I can’t remember how large the force field can get that the network of nanobots form, but I know from reading the notes that it is huge. No matter how big it gets, though, it won’t be enough.

  As the army of Li clones closes in on us, it becomes apparent how they have moved so quickly across the rubble. They aren’t the size of normal humanoids that try and blend in with the rest of the population. They are over twenty feet tall with calf muscles nearly the size of my entire body. These clones are giants, and they are here to make sure that we don’t exist by the end of the day.

  “Ten rocket launchers.” I tap the Chimera Cube, watching as it produces ten of them with backup rockets to launch at the giants. I don’t have time to congratulate myself for suppressing my internal instinct to run. This is one of the first situations in
my life where I can guarantee that won’t work. Our only option is to stand up and fight.

  But these goliaths may be impossible to take down.

  “Take some and shoot!” I scream to the hundreds of people who are immediately around me. Some understand me and some don’t, but everyone knows that we are trapped. Although the force field has been constructed, it is too big to keep out all of the clones of Li. It manages to trap all the people in the area of rubble we have cleared out, yet due to the insane speed at which the giants move forward, they are already within the boundaries of the force field before it closes up.

  This leaves us with a hundred massive Lis within an area no bigger than a dozen football fields, all shooting at us with machine guns and bullets that are proportional to the size of their bodies.

  “One thousand bullet-proof suits,” I scream into the Chimera Cube, holding on to my backpack as I prepare to be smothered in a mountain of black cloth. The people around me seem to understand what is about to happen as some fabric forms in the air, and they pull away all the rocket launchers around me and step to the side as the suits fall down in a massive pile onto the ground.

  “Put these on!” I scream, my voice muffled by both the hazmat suit and bullet-proof fabric around my body. I am moving as fast as I can, but every time I see someone in a hazmat suit fall to the ground, blood spewing out of the white, heavy fabric, I feel more panicked.

  All the work we have done over the last few hours.

  The thousands of lives we have saved and the tons of debris that have been removed from the city streets will all mean nothing if everyone dies.

  That doesn’t even count the hundreds of thousands of people that are still living, trapped underneath the rubble outside of this force field, nothing more than little drops of candy that the thousands of Li clones on the outside of the force field can easily pick off. Nothing is more defeating than watching the same people who you sacrificed everything for be killed by the one man you want to see dead more than anyone else.