Patrick Griffin's Last Breakfast on Earth (19 page)

He'd never quite caught one—much less thought through what he'd do if he did—but his dedication to the sport never wavered.

He chased the junco up and over the small wooded rise and then quickly forgot all about it because he was now able to see down to the golf course pond. A seven-foot-tall timber crucifix covered in vines had been stuck in the middle of its perfectly round island. In front of the cross, a large animal he had never seen in any museum, zoo, TV show, website, app, or picture book was bent over a cell phone.

“Guinea pig?” asked Cassie Griffin as the sun escaped a passing cloud and added ultravivid flecks of green to the prevalent early spring grays.

“Gi-ant ham-ster!” yelled Chloe Tondorf-Schnittman.

Across the shallow water, the creature looked up at the children and shook its antlered head with no small degree of mortification.

 

CHAPTER 29

The History of Ith, V. 12.17

Wikimentaries, Patrick came to discover, were basically like Wikipedia entries, only they were videos. Very fancy videos.

The latest release on Rex Abraham—“Emissary from Earth and Savior of Ith, v. 12.17”—was a sweeping recreation of the historical record including dramatized scenes with skilled actors and the latest cutting-edge graphics, camerawork, and 3D effects.

Set to a majestic orchestral score that Patrick recognized as the basic tune of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” the movie began with scenes of modern Ith life—sky-cars, satellites, public markets, pristine mountains, burbling brooks, sprawling sport stadiums, glass buildings that truly seemed to scrape the sky, gossamer communication satellites, massive robotic container ships, and taper-nosed trains that traveled too fast for the eye to resolve.

The scenes were incredibly realistic, and fully three-dimensional. A sky-car big as a baseball diamond seemed to take off through the ceiling; a speeding courier drone caused Patrick to duck as it swooped through the room and back out again on its way to deposit a package in the hands of a smiling businessman.

The immersive montage went on for a few minutes and then another spider-carrying-a-stop-sign logo filled the screen. Animated beams of light radiated from its hexagonal head:

As the design shimmered, a narrator—a man with all the vocal charms of a middle school basketball coach—began:

THE TWO PRIMARY SENSES ARE THE MINDER'S GREATEST GIFTS TO HUMANITY. BUT AN ORDERLY BALANCE BETWEEN THE TWO MUST BE STRUCK!

IF THE INTERRELATION BETWEEN SIGHT AND SOUND IS NOT PROPERLY MODERATED, CHAOS QUICKLY TAKES ROOT!

What followed was unlike anything Patrick had seen before. It basically told him the story of Rex Abraham, emissary from Earth and savior of the human race.

When Rex arrived, Ith was still in the Stone Age. He, on the other hand, had arrived in black ankle-high boots, jeans, black turtleneck, and was carrying a knapsack filled with high-tech gadgets, including a binky. Patrick immediately wondered about this—how could a man have arrived fifty years ago from Earth and yet be just as, if not more, modern than Earth was now?

Rex wasted no time introducing the wonders of technology to the primitive world and quickly unified Ith's people under the banner of progress and science. He introduced to them everything from the periodic table of elements to the quadratic formula to Newton's laws, Avogadro's theorem, Planck's constant, Mendel's squares, Griffiths' inequality, and even Einstein's theory of relativity.

And so machines were invented, chemistry was advanced, diseases were cured, agriculture was revolutionized, communications were systematized, self-correcting bureaucracies established, knowledge compiled, language homogenized, and a new era of progress and harmony began.

And then it was explained that the whole reason Ith was lagging behind Earth in the first place was because the world had long been infested with
Anarchists
. These were some very bad, bad men—in the film, they wore long beards, brown robes, and pointy hats. For millennia they had been living in secret, emerging from their subterranean chambers only to stir up trouble, cause wars, engineer plagues, and set loose genetically engineered monsters, all with the single goal of causing chaos and generally keeping the human race from achieving its potential.

Now, Rex knew all about the Anarchists and it was his goal to advance technology far and fast enough that he could free Ith of their influence.

Battle scenes followed, in which they watched Rex driving a sky-car chasing a bat-winged serpent, Rex leading a troop of heavily armed soldiers as they gunned down a bigfoot-like creature, Rex standing on the bridge of a battleship as it shelled a tentacled sea monster almost as big as the ship itself, Rex flanked by a dozen broad-chested commandos breaking into an underground conference room filled with pointy-hatted men and making them all get on their knees …

But just as it looked like Rex and the people of Ith might triumph, might finally and completely rid the world of the Anarchist menace, the bad guys struck back. They unleashed the most deadly virus ever known—something called Solipsis Variant 4.

The plague had what was called a
two-pronged vector
: it traveled both through the air and via some very creepy little skin mites—tiny spidery things that actively stalked people and could lie dormant for weeks. This meant that even people wearing respirators were not immune.

Once inside the body the virus attacked nerve cells, and was lethal to people whose brains were past a certain stage of development. There were a lot of fancy terms including
myelination
, but the basic deal was that it killed everybody over the age of three. Everybody. Patrick kept closing his eyes to the enormous piles of dead people.

And yet there was a glimmer of hope. In the final days—as the plague raced around the globe (a single carrier of the disease could infect an entire community within a matter of hours)—Rex gathered the world's best young scientists to develop a vaccine. But before they could begin an assembly line to mass-produce the stuff, before they could even make enough to save themselves, a horrible monster—a revolting, filthy creature that was some sort of cross between a vulture and an overgrown pit bull (and not at all unlike the creature that Kempton had killed in his video game)—came onto the scene. It flew high over the laboratory where Rex and the scientists were working and dropped a single, very powerful bomb.

Rex crawled from the smoldering ruin. Bleeding and burned, he held a single glass ampule. The narrator explained:

WOUNDED BUT ALIVE, REX SURVIVED THE TERRIBLE BLAST. HE EMERGED FROM THE CONFLAGRATION WITH JUST ONE DOSE OF VACCINE AND, NOW, NO WAY TO MANUFACTURE ANY MORE. BUT HE WAS NOT THE ONLY SURVIVOR.

A soot-stained girl—maybe ten or eleven years of age—also clambered out of the debris. She was apparently the child of one of the scientists and, understandably, was crying her head off.

Rex went to her and gave her a hug. And then, for the first time in the film, he spoke.

“You must help all the little children you can find,” he instructed the girl, handing her his phone and then taking her face in his hands. “Although it will be tempting and their cries will break your heart, do not spend time with infants. They are too fragile, and hard to care for. But any child who can walk and talk—you must be their shepherd. They are still too young to be harmed by the coming disease. But they must be protected from wildlife, from cold, and they must be fed. This binky of mine will tell you all you need to know about finding food, shelter, and medicine. You may ask it
any
question and it will answer. Do you understand?”

The girl, clearly terrified, nodded bravely.

“Good girl. In this device is all the wisdom of the Minder, and all the achievements humankind has garnered from across the three worlds. You must be brave. You must be strong. And you must work to keep hope alive and well. Now, go live in the Minder's wisdom and adhere to the Twelve Tenets. And, most important of all,
fear no evil
.”

The little girl was crying her eyes out again and—though he'd seen better acting before—Patrick felt pretty bad for her.

“Take comfort. For even beyond this binky, the Minder will speak to you in dreams, and he will look after you. You are now his special one, you are the protector and savior of Ith. You are this world's
Seer
.”

And with that he grabbed her arm, rolled up her sleeve, and injected the world's only dose of vaccine into her arm.

AND SO REX SACRIFICED HIMSELF THAT A CHILD MIGHT LIVE, AND GROW TO LEAD US INTO THE BRIGHTNESS OF THE MODERN WORLD!

The next scene had Rex collapsing to the ground while the vaccinated girl looked on in terror. A terror which was not unlike Kempton's as the movie stopped, a siren began to wail, and a brilliant red strobe began to pulse.

“CRIMSON ALERT, CRIMSON ALERT!”

 

CHAPTER 30

Field Operations

Although he'd been born one of them, Novitiate Frank Kyle didn't harbor a grain of sentimentality for the people of Earth. All one had to do was look at what they'd done to themselves for the past several millennia (plagues, wars, famines, economic collapse, and … repeat) and the only rational assessment was the very one that Rex himself had made: the world was in need of a forceful reset.

It was almost time. Now that the novitiates had delivered 4G informational technology into the hands of the leading corporations, now that Earth's billions of mistakes could be recorded, rebroadcast, reexamined, and ultimately corrected …

Now that, finally, the leading governments' security organizations were investing heavily in mass communications and data technologies so that the infrastructure would be almost entirely in place for the 2.0 to come …

Now
he and his fellow novitiates had just to stifle this last-ditch ploy by the rebels and it would be clear sailing: Next week, the Purge. The week after that, the survivors could be rounded up, and education could proceed—and thanks to all this advance groundwork, the reboot would proceed much faster than it had on Ith.

He pulled his silver Mercedes into one of the puddle-pocked guest spots behind the Hedgerow Heights Country Club. Turning off the engine, he swiped his BNK-E from its cradle, exited the vehicle, and—after first smoothing back his newscaster hair—removed his golf bag from the hands-free, self-opening trunk.

All novitiates had received bags just like it. They were props to help them blend in with their influential clientele, although a close examination of this particular bag's contents would have set him very far apart from the average golfer. For while the bag did hold a pretty standard assortment of expensive clubs, it also contained a sniper rifle with a full magazine of depleted uranium bullets, each capable of punching through a decimeter of hardened steel.

He heard a tinkling noise as he rested his bag on the pavement and looked to see a big-bellied, skinny-legged man tottering down the footpath, jangling the keys inside the pocket of his salmon-colored pants.