He kicked another person, one of the women who had come with Adam, and then turned to see one of the burly men club at him with a rifle. The butt of the weapon smashed John in the face, point blank, and all went dark.
He faded into blackness, and the last thing he remembered was Adam’s voice.
"Dammit, you killed him."
FAN HQ
AD 3999/AE 1999
Malachi knelt on the central floor, his followers around him. There were only about three hundred of them, far fewer than the number of Controllers, but he did not fear. He knew that their faith would make them strong, and he would fear no evil.
They all prayed, holding weapons in front of their chests like exotic prayer beads, mumbling words to God and all asking for the same thing:
Let today be the day.
Malachi finished his prayer, wiped his eyes, and stood.
"It’s time."
CONTROL HQ - RUSHM
AD 1999/AE 3999
Adam watched John carefully. Blood flowed copiously from the wound on his temple, enough that a casual observer would have bet John soon would be dead, if he wasn’t already.
Yet Adam knew the man was in no danger. Not from the head wound, at least.
In moments, John’s eyes flickered, then opened fully.
"Do you think God loves machines, John?" asked Adam.
John did not respond. His gaze moved around as he tried to take in his surroundings. Adam knew what John was seeing: a dark room, a large desk, and the man who had taken Fran sitting behind it. He saw John tense, saw him steel himself to attack Adam, and held up his hand.
"Try it and Fran will die before you even touch me."
Adam deplored the lie, but knew John was too frightened to be compliant, unless perhaps he believed his good behavior might somehow benefit or protect Fran. It worked. The fight went out of John all at once, as though he were a giant hot air balloon whose air had been crushed from it by the grasp of a giant, leaving it deflated and useless.
"What’s going on?" asked John. His voice was weary and strained. Adam regretted the course he had put John through, but knew it had been necessary. So many hard choices, and so few of them right, it seemed. Did the ends justify the means? he asked himself, but as always there came no answer, just more questions to haunt his conscience.
"I do regret all this," he said to the confused man who sat before him, "but some precautions are necessary. An entire species depends on what you and I do here."
"What are you talking about? Where’s Fran?"
Adam leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers in front of him. "She’s nearby. Being treated for her wounds. She’ll be fine, I assure you."
Adam watched as John looked around, apparently trying to gain some kind of understanding from the empty room they sat in. Adam knew that he would find no enlightenment in this Spartan space, so he spoke. "You want to know what’s happening," he said, making it a statement and not a question. "You want to know why everyone you’ve known and loved your whole life is suddenly a stranger. Why they all want to kill you. Why they don’t stay dead when
they
are killed. Who killed your father. Why everyone is after you and Fran."
John nodded. His face was stony, not giving anything to Adam. That was to be expected, under the circumstances, and Adam smiled at John, a genuinely friendly smile. "What year is it, John?"
"Nineteen ninety nine."
"Wrong. It’s nineteen ninety nine, all right, but not A.D. It’s nineteen ninety nine
A.E.
That’s After Endwar, which doesn’t mean anything to you right now," said Adam, responding to John’s confused look. "So let me translate for you. In your reckoning of time, it’s A.D.
thirty nine
ninety nine."
***
Adam did something as he delivered this pronouncement - John couldn’t see exactly what - and one wall of the room slid away, revealing a gargantuan control room filled with people checking monitors, keying in information on computers, and all looking as busy as the cliché bee. One entire wall of the mammoth room held stacks of glowing cubes John thought were TV screens, until he realized that their images were three-dimensional, and they appeared to be hanging in the air without the benefit of any surrounding chassis.
Adam rose from behind his desk and motioned for John to step into the room. "Go on, John. See where we run the world."
John stood, feeling a bit wobbly. The technology that surrounded him was obviously so far beyond what he knew that he felt like a Neanderthal man holding a Nintendo game. He stepped in and looked at the people, the computers, the monitors. He noticed one of the screens held a view of the inside of his house and pointed at it.
"What’s that?"
Adam looked at where John was pointing. "That’s Mayor Barnes. He was probably waiting at your home on the off chance you would return there, and that’s where he remained when we shut down Loston. You’re seeing through the mini-cams in his eyes."
John snapped his gaze back to Adam. "What?"
Adam shrugged and then delivered the kicker: "All the robots have them."
He turned and went back through the opening, into the office again. John followed and the wall shut behind them, again isolating once more in a featureless space of shadow and gloom. Adam sat back down at his desk and tapped a control, motioning with his other hand for John to be seated again.
"I’m going to paint you a picture, John, and I hope you listen carefully, because this will be unpleasant, and I have no desire to repeat any of it."
A picture appeared in the air between them, a 3-D cube like the ones John had seen in the other room. Pictures of reporters, like any he would see on CNN or MSNBC, flashed across the holograph. Each one of them was obviously speaking into the camera, though John heard no sound, and all of them held looks of despair. They pictures skittered and lurched oddly, and without sound it took him a few moments to realize he was watching a futuristic equivalent of fast-forwarding.
"In the year two thousand," said Adam, speaking from behind the cube, "several of the smaller countries acquired enough nuclear capacity to give the old U.S.A. a run for her money."
John watched as the video cube changed, showing shots of what he recognized as nuclear warheads, though the designs were slightly different from the ones he’d been trained to recognize. Men stood around the weapons, wearing what were clearly military or paramilitary uniforms, though John did not recognize their insignia at all. The men worked on the nukes, tinkering and adjusting them in preparation for whatever was coming next. John felt a sinking dread in the base of his stomach that seemed like pure acid, scalding him and creating a bitter taste in his mouth.
Adam continued. "Within a few months tensions were high enough that someone did the worst thing possible: they fired a warning shot. A sixty-megaton warning shot." The cube disappeared abruptly, leaving John in complete darkness, Adam’s voice wafting through it like a ghost from some nightmare version of a Dickens tale.
"Within one month, most of the earth had been burned over."
The cube reappeared then, and John gasped. It was a picture of a news anchor again. It could have been Tom Brokaw or Sam Donaldson or anyone else, but no one would be able to tell for sure, because the person’s face was ravaged by radiation poisoning, one eye burned away, skin hanging in stringy peels from the bone of his skull, and great tufts of hair falling out even as he spoke. He read from a pair of pages held in his wasted hands, and John heard sound with the video this time, the terrible voice of this world’s past.
"I’m bringing you the latest," said the man. His voice was rough, gravelly, the voice of a corpse who hasn’t the sense to die. He coughed wetly, then put down the papers. "Is there anyone listening? Is there anyone even alive? I’m here in this studio, it’s automated. Just me and the machines. Me and the machines. Don’t bother trying to call in, the phone lines are gone. Everything is. I doubt this signal is even going out."
Blood began to drip from his nose, spattering across his desk. The drip turned into a steady stream as he continued speaking, pooling in a crimson puddle beneath him, running in rivulets over the side of the desk. "It’s just me and the machines, but I have to try. Have...to...."
His head slumped and hit the desk with a wet splat. His eyes were still open, but he was clearly dead. John couldn’t pull his eyes away from the vision, as though he were seeing the death of Pestilence, one of the Four Horsemen, himself. Adam spoke, the dead newsman providing eerie proof of his words.
"Ninety-nine point nine percent of the earth’s population was dead, and the last one tenth of one percent looked like it would soon follow. Radiation was everywhere, and no one had any way of escape. The human race was destined for certain extinction."
"But – " John said.
Adam continued over him. "People survive, John. They always do. That’s God’s plan. I truly believe that, and you should too."
The view on the video cube flickered and then disappeared, mercifully taking the apparition of the newscaster with it. The lights came on in the room and John let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding and looked at Adam.
"So in a hundred years," continued the older man, "there were more people. Still not many, though, and they were still in constant danger of dying off. The earth had been changed by the war - we call it Endwar - the ice caps melted, most of the vegetation gone forever. So the remaining few constructed domed cities, safe havens from the elements."
"Like zoos," said John.
"Very much so." Adam leaned forward, his blue eyes searing into John’s like icy lasers. "But people don’t do well in captivity, even the self-imposed kind. Most of them either went crazy or killed themselves. Radiation levels were up beyond what humans are made for, and one of the results was a new genetic predisposition to insanity. A few of those who went mad - the Fanatics, they call themselves - believed that Endwar was the harbinger of Armageddon, the battle of Gog and Magog. They believed that God was trying to destroy His wicked children, so they took it upon themselves to finish the job for Him."
John started. "One of the people who tried to kill Fran and me said something about his salvation or something."
"That was Malachi. He’s their leader. Their priest. Dedicated to killing off all humankind. They draw their numbers from the domes, and even a few of us," he waved, gesturing so that John would understand that by "us" he meant the people who worked with him, "join them. It’s a controlled madness and a rather strange religion, with only one important new scripture. I have it memorized. Want to hear it?"
John wanted to say - to
scream
– "No!" To shake his head and close his eyes like he had when he was three and his mother tried to feed him peas. But he didn’t. He nodded soundlessly, more afraid of not knowing than he was of discovering the truth. He was realizing now that not knowing was the state in which he had spent his entire life. Not knowing had led him to death, and to this dead place in the future that was also, somehow, the present.
Adam sat back again, closing his eyes. "‘After thou hast killed all others, thy final act will be to come unto Me.’"
"Jesus."
"I hope not." Adam smiled grimly at the joke. "Malachi’s a real danger. Used to be second in command here. Then it all got to him."
"Why didn’t you stop him, then?"
Adam pursed his lips as though this were a sore point. "We live a strange life here, John. One of the strange aspects of it is that we try to live in perfect emotional control. Not only does that free us to make hard decisions, but it also provides an early warning sign of impending insanity. Almost every one of the Controllers will go mad if not killed by a Fan or by radiation poisoning. So we teach ourselves to live in control of our feelings. When we can no longer contain our emotions, when we start to show to much passion, that gives those around us a sign that our mental processes are starting to deteriorate. But it didn’t happen that way with Malachi. He maintained perfect presence of mind, it seemed, up until the very day he ran from Control HQ, and joined the Fans."
"And became their leader," said John.
"Correct. The Fans came after us, or at least they tried to. We used to be located under Old Salt Lake City, but we closed down as soon as he left and came here instead. It’s standard procedure to move from place to place after a defection."
"You must move a lot,"
"Rarely," answered Malachi.
"But you said everyone goes nuts. So don’t they all join his crew?"
"Of course not," answered Adam. "We kill most of them before that happens."
CONTROL HQ - RUSHM
AD 1999/AE 3999
John was silent for a moment, of necessity taking some time to digest the awesome amount of information that threatened to overload his mental processes.
"You kill them?" he repeated at last.
Adam nodded, wearily it seemed, and shut his eyes. "Yes. Try not to judge us too harshly for that. We are all that stands between the Fans and the end of humanity. So we can afford to take no chances with those who show signs of dementia or madness. Because when we miss one, like we missed Malachi, that person becomes just one more soldier in the crusade against our survival. Malachi went over to the Fans, and he’s been killing people in the domes and looking for our headquarters ever since."
"If he’s been doing so much killing, then why isn’t everyone dead?"
Adam’s eyes opened again, answering John’s question incorrectly, perhaps intentionally so. "Technology moved fast in the last year before Endwar. They could take a single atom and inscribe the words from an entire library on its face. They could take a man apart and put him together again." Adam paused, taking a deep breath. "And they could create life...or a reasonable facsimile thereof."
Again, John’s mind reeled with the implications of what had been said and what he sensed Adam was about to say. The older man stood and gestured for John to follow him. They went to another part of the wall that looked no different from the other surfaces around them, but when they approached it split open, creating a narrow door that allowed them to exit. Adam stepped through and led John down a series of corridors before going through yet another door. The new room they entered was a lab. Completely mechanized, lined by huge tubes with clear faces. Adam gestured, inviting John to look in the clearest tube.