The Recent Past...
Utropollus Major
It was dark on the edge of the encampment; the night seemed to conspire against the illumination cast by the fire, pushing in on it like a fog. The two of them – Kara and Sullivan – sat silently, their eyes glazed by the darkness, the flashlights on the end of their blasters dusting through the darkness occasionally. Sullivan just stared out, into the endless night, into the silhouette ghost buildings that were dark blankets against the night sky.
The silence was deafening, the darkness blinding, and all manner of other clichés in which Sullivan had little interest. The drugs had long since taken their effect; in fact, they’d done so before they had even reached the edge of the encampment and relieved Joshua and Orson. Considering the dose Sullivan had taken, this was not a surprise.
“You look like you’re afraid,” Sullivan commented. He could see the smooth contours of Kara’s face even through the darkness; he could make out the fear in her delicate features. Sullivan had always been good at reading people. The drugs helped with that too. Detachment. Yes, detachment was the thing; it’s easy to analyze another human being objectively when they mean nothing to you.
Kara eyed him. She seemed to weigh the worth of even replying to Sullivan, his secret now revealed to her. “I am afraid,” she finally admitted.
“What are you afraid of, Kara?” Sullivan said, his voice perfectly even.
Kara looked at him, puzzled. “What am I afraid of? This. Dying. The end of the world.” She paused a moment, examining him. “But you’re not, are you. No, none of this phases you at all, does it?”
“No,” Sullivan admitted. “I’m not afraid. I don’t know what I would be afraid of.”
“Because of the drugs.”
Sullivan sighed. Yes, it was because of the drugs. How could he put it in words that she would understand? He swept across the darkness with the light from his blaster rifle. “I guess so.”
Sullivan’s light swept across her area, coming across a lone figure. It was one of the drudges; its flesh torso comprised of half-exposed bone and bleeding flesh. Some of its limbs were artificial, some were radically altered human limbs from different corpses, attached and held by mechanical means. It walked stiffly, bow-legged; its face was a sunken, decaying nightmare of flesh and metal. By the time Kara saw it, it was already close; she screamed in terror, dropping her weapon.
But Sullivan just stood, and, in total calm, fired his weapon repeatedly at it. A few nanites buzzed around it, hissing as they cut through the air. He acted quickly, emotionless, cutting the monstrosity’s legs out from underneath it. With equal precision he pulled an ion grenade from his belt, setting it without looking and tossing it. It struck the drudge exactly, exploding on impact and sending rays and bolts of electricity that cut the nanites from the air and dropped the drudge to the ground.
Sullivan approached where it lay still, twitching and fighting to get to its feet, the few surviving nanites in its body struggling to reconnect. Kara could not see him through the darkness, but watched the darkness illuminated by ten succinct blaster shots, each one silhouetting Sullivan’s form in a sort of macabre slide show, a strobe-light distraction from a funhouse of some sort.
By the time he returned, there was no sign of movement beyond the encampment. Kara, for what little time she had left in her life, would never forget the look on Sullivan’s face as he sat back down across from her, blood covering parts of his uniform. Not because it was remarkable, for it was not. But because it was completely and utterly unremarkable, devoid of even the slightest response to the horror he had just witnessed.
“The look on your face,” she said, under her breath.
“I’m sorry?”
“The look on your face, just then. It’s like nothing affected you at all. You could have been riding in a speeder or watching a holodrama. What about the things you’ve seen over the past few days? The killing, the brutality, the suffering? None of it even phases you, even gives you pause?”
Sullivan weighed this. “The things I have seen over the past couple of days have been no worse than what I saw in the military. At least this enemy functions with the cold, precise nature of a machine. I’ve seen people do much worse than this to one another. I’ve watched women and children have their arms and legs amputated by rebel commandos; I’ve seen young boys castrated by drug lords; I’ve seen fathers forced to watch their children burned alive. At least these machines just kill you.”
Kara blinked and looked at the ground. “That’s academics,” she said softly. “Drugs or no drugs, doesn’t a part of you – somewhere – respond to any of this?”
Sullivan looked out into the night. An allegory. “I’d like to say that it did. I’d like to tell you that every time I see someone die, a part of me reaches out to them. That when I look into the eyes of a suffering child I can feel his pain. But I can’t.” He paused. “No. None of this even touches me. I don’t feel angry, or depressed, or worried, or afraid. I don’t feel anything at all. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt anything.”
Kara stared. “What are they?”
“The drugs?”
“Yes.”
“Libextoprophene. LXP for short. They used to use it as part of an anesthetic regimen, awhile back. And in the army. They don’t anymore, but you can still get it fairly easily. I think it’s still legal in a few districts by prescription. It’s a dissociative. That’s what they call it. In high enough doses, you hallucinate. In doses just above what is medically recommended, it disconnects you from reality. It disconnects you from yourself, from other people, from pain and happiness and sadness and joy.”
“How long have you been taking them?” Kara added.
“I’ve been addicted to LXP for fifteen years. But I’ve been on and off drugs, alcohol and medication for my entire life.”
“Don’t you ever wish you could feel something? Anything?”
Sullivan sighed. “No. It’s a pretty easy tradeoff to make, sadness for numbness. I’m a lifelong addict. I have an addictive personality and all the makings of a drug abuser. LXP is just my high of choice right now; I’ve been to rehab for alcohol, spice, drugs of every variety. When I was fifteen, I tried to kill myself. I swallowed everything in my mother’s medicine cabinet. They had my stomach pumped. I still remember waking up in the hospital, with my family around me. They were telling me that everything was okay, that everything was fine, I was alright and they were there and it was great.
“And I can still remember how much I just wanted to scream at all of them that it was not alright. I didn’t want to wake up. I hated them all; I wished that they’d just left me to die. Of the next five years, I spent half of it in rehabilitation centers and clinics. I spent the rest in therapy. I was diagnosed manic depressive a month after my suicide attempt. I became an alcoholic; I did amphetamines; I did spice. I did everything.
“Slowly downward, slowly downward.
“I managed to finish school with decent enough grades. I never had to try in school, that was the thing; I made up for lost time easily. Sometimes I was angry that I felt so angry. I hated myself, I hated life. Everything seemed hopeless; everything was cold to the touch, completely empty of meaning. I spent whole days in my room, staring at the wall, wanting to die. I didn’t know why I felt that way. I had never gone through any terribly scarring experiences; I was never abused as a child. I had a loving family who cared about me and stuck with me the whole way through. I had brains a million other kids didn’t have. But for some reason, god – if he is somewhere up there, laughing down at me – decided that my brain would work this way, that the endorphins or the serotonin wouldn’t flow just the way they were supposed to, that things just wouldn’t work quite right. I never chose to feel sad. I just was.
“I washed out of college after a few months. I got hooked on prescription drugs; painkillers. I found myself in a rehab clinic again a few months later. They told me I needed a direction in life. Once I was clean and feeling a little better, I went and joined the army. It was like a family to me. My depression got better. It comes and goes, I’m told. It lies dormant for a time. Puberty ended, of course, and I guess that changed some of the chemicals in my head for the better. But that wasn’t it. Mostly, it was the army.
“It’s an easy way to live, the army. Physical work, long hours, no time to think. In fact, they encourage you not to think. It’s better that way. You do little tricks for them, and then you’re rewarded; the more willing you are to obey, the better you do. Like a monkey. Unconsciousness. That was the thing I’d always been looking for, and that’s what the army gave me. A drug-free high that didn’t fuck me up, and lasted for months at a time. You just do what you’re told and when you do, they make you feel good about yourself. You fly from place to place, and the waking hours are just time between sleeping.
“A few years in, I was already a commander. People respected me and it felt good, and all I’d had to do was get in better shape and then follow orders. We’d been carrying out these raids, you see, in the middle of the night. They were raids on drug cartel camps. We’d slip in, slaughter twenty or thirty guys before they could pull weapons on us, and then leave.
“The raids had been going on for a month when I noticed that one of the local holopapers, they’d been following this story. Seems that little mining camps of rural settlers kept disappearing. These camps would be established for small companies in rural towns, kept up for a few months, then torn down. But lately, the miners had been turning up dead. And when I looked at the back issues of the paper, I noticed that on the night of almost every raid we’d carried out, there was one of these stories.
“So, you know what I did?” Sullivan asked.
“No,” Kara answered quietly.
“Nothing. I shut the holoterminal off and went on another raid, and then another. I forgot all about it for another month. The raids were wrapping up then; it was almost over. We were inserted as usual, a few miles out. We hiked in, and did what we were told; killed what we were supposed to, and left for the extraction zone.
“It’s funny. Little coincidences you have no control over. Little twists of fate. Who knows how long I could have labored in blissful ignorance? But that night, one of the speeders crashed. Mechanical failure. All of the pilots were killed. So my squad had to hike to a secondary extraction point. This happened to take us by a local village, nestled in a clearing in the forest, in the middle of nowhere. It was one in the morning, but every light was on; the streets were filled with crying women and children. And as my squad walked down the town’s only paved road, the bodies were carried in one by one.
“It was a parade of the dead. Blaster scarred bodies on stretchers, carried by crying medics, through a crowd of crying women and crying children. It didn’t take long before we noticed our handiwork.
“I was numb. I asked one of the women who the people were. She said, ‘Just miners,’ and burst into tears. ‘My husband was one of them.’ We all looked at each other and knew what we had done. I don’t know if they understood the full magnitude, but I did. Government ties to the mining industry were well-documented. The villagers were moving in on their territory. So we killed them.
“On the hike to the extraction point, none of us talked about it. No one ever mentioned what we had seen to anyone else or talked about it again. Everyone just did their best to forget, I guess. But it’s one of those things; once it’s done, it can never be undone. The drug-free high of the army was done, for me; slowly downward, slowly downward. I felt every atrocity I saw more pronouncedly than ever; my depression returned tenfold. I started buying libextoprophene off of one of the other guys, and I was hooked.”
“You never got caught?” Kara asked.
“No, I did. When they found out I was on LXP, no one cared. It’s an open secret in military. Drugs are everywhere. They don’t care because LXP doesn’t seriously impair motor function in moderation, but it does detach you from what you’re doing. You follow orders more closely; you’re never afraid; you kill unquestioningly. You don’t stop to think, and you certainly don’t feel anything for the people you’re fighting. Exactly what they want in a soldier.”
The two sat in silence in the dark for a while, scanning the darkness with their lights. A rustle to their right caught their attention momentarily, but turned out to be nothing. Kara, though, had sat bolt upright at the first indication of any sound. It took a few minutes before the fear had faded from her face. Sullivan both pitied and envied her. “You’re jumpy,” he commented.
“You would be, too.” Her voice was laced with what might have been jealousy. In the back of his mind, Sullivan wondered if she both pitied and envied him, as well.
“You’re afraid?” Sullivan asked. It was an honest question.
Kara looked at him, irritated. “Of course I’m afraid. But it’s more than that. My mind is still reeling. I just watched everything I ever held dear be destroyed. I don’t know whether to grieve or be afraid, or just give up. Even you must understand that.”
Sullivan studied her for a moment within the objectivity of his numbness. “No. I can’t remember a time that this place meant anything to me. Whatever cosmic wheel that decides where you’re born just happened to stop over Utropollus when it was my turn. The fact that it’s gone now just seems to prove to me how hollow I always thought this place was.”
“But… even if we live, what then? What will we do? Where will we go? Where will
you go?”
Sullivan laughed darkly. “I honestly don’t think that will happen.”
“And that doesn’t scare you? Death? Doesn’t your life mean anything to you?”
“Hm.” Sullivan stared at the ground for awhile. The movie reel of his life wound through his brain, the downward spiral that had comprised everything he had ever known painting pictures in his mind’s eye. “No.”
“I don’t believe that. You’re still here, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Sullivan shrugged. “What can I say? The path of least resistance. I’ve floated through the past fifteen years in a daze. What is my life? What has it ever been? A set of unfortunate circumstances. A rat in a cage bouncing off the obstacles in his way. If you’re asking me whether I have anything to live for, or whether I can think of tomorrow or the day after, or any of the next thousand days down the line ever being something more than this, I don’t and I can’t. Just a haze of half-formed thoughts, dead brain cells and going slowly downward, slowly downward.”
“So that’s how you’re going to live out the last days of your life? Cold and lifeless – like them?” Kara asked. “Like the machines that hunt us?”
At this, Sullivan finally threw his head back and laughed, his cold, dark, macabre laugh, into the night. “What are you laughing at?” Kara, clearly frustrated asked. “Why is this funny? What the fuck is so funny?” Slowly, Sullivan stopped laughing.
“Come on, haven’t you been listening, Kara? What are human beings but machines? Sometimes we’re broken, and sometimes we’re fixed; sometimes we work and sometimes we don’t. But all we are is a set of math equations. Input and output. I never chose to be depressed, I just was. From there, nothing was a choice. Just input and output, a simple set of actions and reactions. These machines just work on a much simpler set of variables.”
The rustle, to the right again. This time it was more prolonged, and more distant; and now it was followed by a blood-curdling scream. Yet the scream came not from the direction of the commotion, but from behind them, in the encampment. The mother of the young child, Andrew, ran forth, drenched in sweat. “Andrew!” She shouted. “He’s gone! He ran off – I don’t –” With this half-spoken explanation, she set off forward again, towards the commotion to the distant right, beyond the splintered buildings and such catastrophe.
Sullivan caught her as the first shots were fired. They too, came from the direction of the commotion. “Stay here,” he said. “You can’t do any good. Go back to your tent and wait.” He called Isaac and Karl, and Kara had already set off in the direction of the violence by the time they got there. “Slowly downward, slowly downward,” he muttered under his breath. “Hold the post,” Sullivan told them, and they agreed.
As he caught up with Kara, he told her how stupid an idea this was. “All for one kid,” he said, but stuck by her nonetheless. Up and over the broken duracrete they went, the piled remnants of the buildings leading them up into the midst of a shattered archway. Down below the small, artificial hill was a corridor of fallen and standing duracrete walls. Kara rushed down and into it, the din of gunfire continuing. The edges of the camp were only barely visible behind them now, obscured by the hills of rubble.
And just beyond the brief corridor was the confluence of four alleyways, framed by fallen buildings on all side – and illuminated by blaster fire. From down one of the alleys, drudges fired at them. They ducked and took cover behind fallen duracrete, firing back viciously. Sullivan tossed another of the grenades, hoping to down any nearby nanites. And as the grenade burst, its payload of electricity splintering through the night, the light of its combustions shone just brilliantly enough to make visible one little form, standing horrified in the midst of the commotion, in the middle of the confluence of alleyways. It was the boy. “Andrew!” Shouted Kara.
The boy ran away, down the alley to the right. It was then that Sullivan, firing at the ever-encroaching drudges as he was, became conscious of the bursts of light coming from the direction of the camp, just barely visible now. Kara stood, ready to pursue the boy. “Kara,” Sullivan said, grabbing her arm and motioning towards the camp.
She pulled herself from his grasp and ran off towards Andrew. “Slowly downward,” Sullivan whispered, “slowly downward.”
He chased after her. The drugs seemed to pull him deeper when his mind should have been the most alert. It was like a lucid dreamscape as the two rushed down a maze of half-shattered alleyways, weapons blazing at the drudges that would appear around them, catching the occasional glimpse of the boy – always just beyond reach. Their feet were like air; Sullivan’s fire cut through drudge after horrifying drudge, blood splattering across them at close range, limbs flying free of their owners. He swung his rifle at one, with such abandon that it embedded itself partially in his target’s head, comprised of flesh and metal. Firing the weapon set it free, and then he was off again, running like the wind.
It was a funhouse.
The lights of the funhouse were unnatural and multi-colored, all wrong for the setting and clashing with one another.
The drudges were the monsters, little cardboard cutouts that popped up at them. The worst part about monsters is that there’s always something recognizable about them. Something that makes them like you. Human arms, heads, limbs attached to metal monster bodies. Sometimes Sullivan would catch a glimpse of an eye.
The world swam with the fluid dizziness of a funhouse mirror, Kara all distorted, his own thoughts a blur.
Sullivan laughed. It was a real laugh. This was comedy, this was horror, this was the joke of the almighty on them all! To make a world into a funhouse, to lock its inhabitants in and throw away the key, to make some of them into bizarre horrible little monsters and chase the rest about like mice in a maze.
And like all lab rats, Sullivan knew that their ultimate destiny was a quick and easy disposal.
The funhouse came to an end abruptly. It was like a speeder full of thoughts hitting a brick wall, all of them rushing simultaneously forward into an orgy of knowledge overwhelming Sullivan. The suddenness of it all inundated him, and he was made so aware that it became even more like a dizzying fantasy nightmare. The dial of awareness spun the whole way around, landing back on slow-motion daydream.
It all seemed to happen simultaneously; the child rushing into the dead end of the alleyway, the drudge attacking him, the laser lights of their rifles cutting the monster down only too late; the ion grenade ripping the thing at last to shreds. And finally, a boy against all odds still standing, crying there in the madness of the funhouse, seemingly oblivious to the wound he had suffered.
And slowly, as Andrew’s head lifted up, Sullivan saw that he was no longer human. His eyes were sunken and the flesh around them pale; the wound on his chest pulsating like some kind of suppurating tear in the very fabric of his humanity. The coldness of his skin, the bizarre coloring of his pupils, the metallic sheen that seemed to begin to take hold of him.
“They’ve taken control of him,” Sullivan said, with dizzying calm.
“No!” Kara cried. “There’s a chance!”
He raised his rifle. “You know there’s not.”
“Stop! Stop!” She screamed at him.
“Slowly downward, slowly downward,” he whispered. And then he took him apart. The shots singed the boy’s flesh, knocking him to the ground as he shouted feral, incoherent obscenities. Again and again, loosing tendon, flesh and bone; shearing free one arm, then another. The viciousness of the boy’s struggle left no doubt his mind was deceased, and his body no longer his own.
Kara watched, as he fired again and again, finding himself without an ion grenade and so closing in to close range and slamming down his rifle repeatedly on the twitching body of the child, as the nanites that infested it restructured and restructured themselves. Like a lab rat throwing itself against its own cage, again and again the child tried to lash out, and mercilessly Sullivan fired and struck, fired and struck. If he was conscious of what he was doing, he gave no indication of it.
Tears poured down Kara’s face. She fell to the ground, sobbing, screaming into the dirt and ashes on the ground. Some things are too terrible to watch, even for a soldier. She wondered how Sullivan could be so heartless; how he could, even in the haze that his life had become, operate with such ruthless efficacy. She was caught between being horrified and being thankful.
But finally the twitching had nearly stopped, the child’s nanite-infested body dismembered thoroughly, and Sullivan Bridgewater stood, covered from head to toe in blood. Another wail escaped Kara as she looked up at Sullivan, as he grabbed her and pulled her to her feet, his thin frame surprisingly strong. Their eyes met, tears still blurring her vision as she stared at this emotionless thing before her.
For just a second, she thought she saw a glint of sadness in his eyes. She was certain of it, but then it was gone. He steadied himself, and clenched his jaw. “Now do you see?” He asked, and began dragging her from that dead end, back the way they’d come. “Now do you see?”
And she did see. They found their way to the street, where no drudges stood to batter them, but Kara was still crying. She didn’t cry out of sadness. She expected to be sad, but here at the edge of the end – beyond the last days of Utropollus, beyond the apocalypse – she found herself completely at utterly empty. She had nothing more to give. And this emptiness was the darkest emotion of all, the coldest thing she had ever felt. So she cried, because there was nothing else she could do. Because Sullivan was right.
They were nothing but machines.
In slow-motion they jogged, blood-drenched Sullivan still dragging Kara, all of the miles back to the camp. Eventually no more tears would come, and she just let herself be pulled.
The return to the camp heralded a reminder of the fight they had left behind. Sullivan stopped dragging Kara and broke into a run, firing at the few remaining drudges surrounding the camp. Shouts and gunfire lit his way as he acted to flank the monsters, his blasts confusing and cutting them. Kara, numb and broken, dragged herself into the camp itself, offering only a few paltry shots at their enemies.
The fight lasted only a few minutes longer. Grenades and laserfire finally cut down the last of them.
Sullivan approached through the smoldering battlefield. He found the forms of Isaac, Karl and a few others, shadows against the glow of the fire from behind the tents. “Where were you?” Isaac asked. Sullivan didn’t answer at first.
Kara approached them from behind, as Karl shouted at the others to pile and burn the bodies. “I said, where were you?”
“I heard you.” Sullivan looked at Kara, who still seemed dazed. She looked to Isaac, then Sullivan.
“We went after Andrew,” Kara said. “It was my idea.”
“The boy?”
“Yes.” Sullivan answered, this time.
“And?”
Sullivan looked at Kara, and she at him. “He’s dead,” he said simply.
Isaac nodded.
“Someone should tell the mother,” Sullivan suggested, when Isaac said nothing in reply.
“I couldn’t find her,” Kara said.
Isaac spat. “The boy’s mother is dead as well. She was killed in the attack. So were two others.”
Kara buried her head in her hands. Sullivan simply nodded, and went about the task of piling bodies in a great pyre just outside the camp. And that night, they threw gasoline recovered days before onto them, and set them all ablaze, lest any of the mindless nanites reassert their control over the waste material that the corpses comprised, or burrow their way out and attack them.
The orange light of the fire cast a radiance all its own, and chased away the darkness of the night more effectively than the camp fire ever had. The band of survivors – the remaining eighteen – took to sitting around the burning bodies for protection and illumination. No one seemed particularly bothered by this.
“Slowly downward,” Sullivan was seen to mutter as he stared that lifeless stare of his into the flames, “slowly downward.”
