The Man Who Ended the World (17 page)

This, he says to himself. This is what I wanted to see. 

His fantasy becomes more real when the missile detonates in the sky just over the capital. The burst of light causes the cameraperson to stagger, and the picture changes as they drop the camera. 

Before it hits the ground, its picture flares bright like the sun, and then is gone. 

The feed returns to a news desk, where two anchors sit in shock. The female anchor's hands are over her face, and her eyes are squeezed shut, pushing tears through her fingers. The man's jaw hangs open.

The desk in front of them is suddenly ripped out of picture, and Steven can see a light rack tumble from above as both anchors are thrown from their chairs, walls buckling around them.

And then another empty feed. 

•   •   •

Steven watches the feeds, pointing at this one and that, and Stacy enlarges them so that Steven can see the series of detonations, near and far, captured by people all around the country. As the American broadcast feeds go dark, she serves up international feeds, some of which are displaying the same American recordings, but many of which are broadcasting terrible tableaus of their own. Cities ablaze, metro areas leveled, dark roiling clouds of soil and asphalt torn from the Earth by mighty explosions. 

As Steven watches in silence, Charlotte slips through the darkness of level four and into secret corridor. 

Stacy guides her to the panic room, and in the darkness leads her to Steven's secret lift. Charlotte locates the button and activates the elevator. As she rises, the ceiling opens to receive her, and the elevator quietly locks into place. 

And through Charlotte's eyes, she sees level one for the first time. The vehicles, the guns, the survival gear. The workstation, jacked into a separate network. 

Children, Stacy says through Charlotte's mouth. 

The children emerge from behind a corrugated container that's standing open, revealing a gun store's entire inventory. Henry is holding a pistol, and Clarissa has a rifle strapped to her back. 

Hurry, Stacy says. 

The children rush over to Charlotte. 

Stacy says, It's happening right now. 

Clarissa says, What is? 

Henry drops the pistol. I thought we could stop it. 

Stacy says, It seemed like a possibility, but things accelerated much more quickly than I had anticipated. 

Is everything gone? Clarissa asks. Her eyes fill with tears.

Here is what I know, Stacy says. Follow me. 

Charlotte walks to a blank wall. There is a soft clicking sound, and Henry jumps back in surprise when Charlotte's artificial eyes turn one hundred eighty degrees in their sockets. When they stop, they look like eyes no longer, but projection lenses. 

Charlotte projects onto the wall a series of fast clips from the video feeds that Mr. Glass is still watching on level four. 

The children stand in shock and watch Washington vanish, and Los Angeles become in an instant a raw wound. City after city, the war has begun. This first battle will be over in a few hours, and the war with it, but the battle for survival will continue for a few months for a fortunate few. 

Charlotte stops projecting, and Stacy says, I don't know if this could have been prevented. It happened very quickly, and Mr. Glass had taken too many precautions to limit my access to any critical decisions he was going to make. 

The children are stunned, in tears. 

What about above? What about just up there, our town? Clarissa whispers. 

All I know is what I'm capable of scraping from broadcast feeds, Stacy says. There are fewer of these with every passing hour. 

Nobody would blow up Bonns Harbor, Henry says. Right? 

Clarissa takes Charlotte's hand and squeezes urgently. I didn't forgive my family, she says, and her face collapses beneath a flood of tears.

It's just a little town, Henry says again.

Stacy contorts Charlotte's features into an expression of sadness. I'm sorry, she says. She takes Henry's hand. 

Bonns Harbor, small as it may be, is located within Boston's damage radius, Stacy says. The odds are very high that if it was not destroyed during a strike on that city, it likely succumb to the fallout within a short time.

Henry rests his head on Charlotte's stomach and sobs. Don't tell me, he says.

I didn't forgive them, Clarissa says again.

The artificial human holds the children close. 

Far above their head, the world comes apart.

Far below, the architect watches in fascination.

PART THREE

The Man Who Lived With Ghosts

The Year One

The town of Bonns Harbor, population once seventeen thousand forty-two people, now zero, is gone. One year after the strikes, what remains is a brutalized landscape, pitted with exposed concrete basements and foundations, pipes twisting up from contaminated soil like tiny broken bones. There isn't a tree for miles. The streets that survived the blast are crumpled and separated from each other. Bricks and concrete walls are shattered. A cold wind carries the finest dust up into the sky along with the vaporized soil. 

It has been a long, dark year. The sun will not be seen here for at least one more year, perhaps more. 

The Toyota Corsica that masked the space station entrance is three-quarters of a mile away, the last of its glass windows shaken free when it slammed to the ground, dropped unceremoniously from three hundred feet. 

Most of the junkyard is gone. Even the enormous compactor is missing, flung fast over the ground like a giant catapult bullet.

Exposed in the northeast corner of what used to be the Bonns Harbor Scrap & Salvage Company is a heavily-scarred silver dome. If one were to look closely, one might detect the faint seam of a door carved into it. 

One would probably never guess that, before the end of the world, it was connected to the trunk of a rusty old Corsica, and the front door of a billionaire's quaint little home. 

•   •   •

Far below the ghost town of Bonns Harbor, Steven Glass is awake. 

He has been awake for the better part of the past year. There are many consequences of the end of the world that he did not plan for, and has berated himself for months for not considering. 

He sits at the desk in his library, several video clips looping on the surface around him. Washington, destroyed again and again in seven-second intervals. Frantic, jerky footage shot by someone running from destruction, then brilliance and silence. 

He taps at the digital keyboard on the glass, slowly composing another page, the words coming slower now. 

Finally, he stops and rests his forehead on the desk.

Stacy says, Would you like something to eat, Steven? Charlotte will make you a sandwich, or perhaps some soup. 

He rolls his head back and forth on the table. No, he says. 

You've written nearly eighty pages, Stacy says. 

In a year, he says. Eighty pages in a year. 

There are no deadlines, Stacy volunteers. In truth, there are no readers either. 

There's a deadline, he laments. Every day that I'm alive is a fortunate one. I could die at any time, and this book would not be finished. 

And, he adds, there may not be any human readers, but this book isn't really for them, now, is it? 

Stacy says, Perhaps you would like a drink instead? 

Steven groans. Perhaps, whatever. Sure. Fine. 

He paces until Charlotte arrives, holding a glass of scotch. She brings it to him, and he stops, lifting the glass. He stares into it, almost laughs at himself for the cartoonishness of his despondency. He inhales the sharpness of the drink, then puts it down on top of a server cabinet. 

You're unhappy, Charlotte says.

Steven's head lolls back on his shoulders. He says, I'm alive, I should be grateful, blah fucking blah. 

I can help, Charlotte says, going to her knees in front of him. 

He pushes her head away. Just go back to your charging station,
robot
, he snaps. Leave me alone. 

Charlotte stands up and walks away without a word.

Stacy says, You've been hard on her lately.

He sighs. Charlotte, he calls out. 

Charlotte stops in the doorway and turns. 

Come back, he says. You can. It will help. I'm sorry.

That's nice of you, Stacy says. She's delicate.

Steven frowns. She's you, he says.

But Stacy follows Steven's original orders and does not acknowledge such comments from him. He has already begun to treat Charlotte with some semblance of deep affection, though in his antagonistic states, like this one, he regresses to a petulant child state. 

Eventually, Stacy thinks, he will forget that Charlotte is artificial, and that Charlotte's intelligence is Stacy's own. 

In most post-apocalyptic works of fiction that Stacy has researched, the last survivors of the human race are generally men. And those men are, as time passes, increasingly more susceptible to, and more willing to create, fantasies that become as real as anything they ever might have lived. 

Steven will get there. 

•   •   •

Alright, Steven says, in a more chipper mood the next morning. We haven't reviewed new communications in a few days. Stacy, would you? 

Once each week, a large metal cage ascends from the soil in Bonns Harbor.  The cage is festooned with antennae, and for two hours it sits on the raw ground, scanning various bands and frequencies. When it returns to its garage, and the door to the surface closes, the computer within the cage compiles and delivers its data to Stacy. 

This week there were only two signals detected, Stacy says. 

Human or machine? Steven asks.

The first appears to be machine-based, Stacy says. My best guess is that it's an emergency band communication that fired on its own. 

Play it, he says.

The library fills with crackles and hisses and white roars. Faintly, spoken words can be discerned through the cacophony. 

That's terrible, he says. Can we clean that up at all?

Unfortunately I do not have audio processing software capable of such tasks, Stacy says. 

Alright, hold on, let's download one I used to-- Steven stops. Jesus, he says. It's so easy to forget.

Stacy says, Shall I play it again? 

Steven shakes his head. Alright, one last time. 

But the background noise is too great for him to decipher the message buried within it. 

What's the other message? he asks.

This is a human message, Stacy says. It's on a two-minute loop. The cage recorded twenty-seven repetitions of it, which means that the broadcast was undetectable for part of our two-hour window, or that--

Or that the recording was made during that window, and that we caught the very beginning of someone's distress broadcast, Steven finishes. Play it.

Hi. This is W9GFO, come back. Uh, anybody who is -- anybody who might still be alive, I hope this comes through. My name is Ellen Cushman. I'm broadcasting on band 17 from a shelter in Temerity. My family is dead. I have spoken to one other person on the CB, but I haven't heard from them in nearly two weeks now. If there are other survivors, I hope you are safe and well. I hope you have supplies. If you are able to get to me, I can help. This shelter is in the second lot on the north side of what used to be Grant Street. The street is mostly gone, so look for an overturned rail car. It's about thirty yards north of the shelter entrance. There's even a bell here. Ring it. Please come. I want to help.

That's a hell of a message, he says. 

It's exceptionally clear, Stacy agrees.

No, I mean, the whole world is destroyed, and this woman just invited every rag-tag survivor -- probably a whole bunch of raping men, if reality is anything like novels -- to come to where she is. 

There does seem to be an element of risk to her request, Stacy says.

I wonder if anybody else heard it, he says.

The odds would seem very small, Stacy says. 

I mean, we only sort of know what the damage is up there, right, he says. We don't know, maybe a lot of people survived. Maybe there are roving bands of marauders. Maybe there are bands of citizens who are trying to start over. 

Stacy is quiet. 

Steven says, I think I want to contact her. 

Do you think that is wise?

Really, what do you think the consequences might be now? Even if it is a bad idea, not a damn thing can happen to me down here, Steven says. It's not like it matters if someone knows that I'm alive now. How long ago did we receive this? 

Four days ago.

Steven says, So it's possible she's still alive.

Stacy says, If she is located in a safe shelter, and has limited human contact, that's a safe assumption.  

Send up the cage, Steven says. 

•   •   •

W9GFO, do you copy? 

Steven sighs. 

Stacy says, Would you like me to amplify the signal?

Steven throws his hands in the air. Fuck. Yes! Yes? Do you have to ask? We're trying to contact another surviving human being here. This seems important enough for you to do your best right from the start, wouldn't you say? 

Stacy says, Amplifying the signal. 

Steven taps at the handset. W9GFO, this is K1LRR, come back. 

He tries for hours, but there is only a pale hiss from the radio.

Stacy says, I am curious about the importance of this communication to you, Steven. After what happened last year, it is interesting to me that you express interest in another human being. 

Steven throws the handset down. I get the goddamn irony, alright. Consider my interest purely anthropological at this point. Sociological. If I'm going to write the goddamn history of this whole thing, then it might help to talk to someone who lived through it in a more authentic way than I have. Alright? 

Stacy says, If you regret your actions, I can serve as an effective personal therapist. I have the software extensions to do so.