The End - Visions of Apocalypse Read online

  The End

  Visions of Apocalypse

  Compiled and edited by

  N. E. White

  Cover art by: Adam Burn

  Interior images by Robert Garbin

  Cover design by Wilson Geiger and Michael J. Sullivan

  Proofread by Andrew Leon Hudson

  Digital file formatted by Chris Mitchell

  Kindle Edition License Notes

  Thank you for purchasing this ebook.

  This story collection remains the copyrighted property of the individual authors, and may not be reproduced, copied and/or distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed these stories, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Amazon.com.

  Thank you for your support.

  Dedicated to Ray Bradbury:

  May his words reach beyond the end of this world.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction by N. E. White

  1. Executable by Hugh Howey

  2. Let’s See What Tomorrow Brings by Igor Ljubuncic

  3. Julia’s Garden by Michael Aaron

  4. Tick by Wilson Geiger

  5. The Last Hand by Pete McLean

  6. Fly the Moon to Me by Stephen “B5” Jones

  7. Relapse by Norman Gray

  8. Burning Alexandria by Michael J. Sullivan

  9. Silver Sky by Liam Baldwin

  10. Sacrifice by G. L. Lathian

  11. Empty Nest by R. F. Dickson

  12. Mother and Child by Tristis Ward

  I

  NTRODUCTION

  N. E. White

  The writing forum at SFFWorld.com is a wonderful place. Like other online writing communities, members gather to share their work and for encouragement.

  For the past four years, I have interacted with that virtual community, hoping to learn from writers like Elizabeth Moon, Jon Sprunk, Michael J. Sullivan, Hugh Howey, Kerry Tolan and many others that pop-in or frequent the forums. I’ve read hundreds of threads about developing character, world-building, and much more.

  Those of us new to the craft of writing also get a chance to practice our skills on the forum. Each month, SFFWorld.com members take part in friendly, flash-fiction competitions. Over the years, some of the stories submitted have made me laugh, moved me to tears, or caused me to ponder an idea in a new light. I’ve learned a lot about writing fiction from reading those stories.

  To show my appreciation for all I’ve learned, I wanted to do something enduring for the community. With all the recent talk regarding the Mayan prediction of the end of the world imminent at the 2012 Winter Solstice, I thought, “Better create that anthology we’ve been talking about before we lose the chance.”

  And since we all love contests, why not choose the stories in our traditional democratic fashion?

  Thus began “The End,” a collection of stories written and chosen by SFFWorld.com forum members. In addition to these science fiction and fantasy short stories, Michael J. Sullivan, Hugh Howey, and Tristis Ward each contributed a story for the anthology.

  The topics explored herein range from the silly to the profound. Some will give you hope, others will make you pray for a different end, and one might even make you smile. I’m sure you’ll find at least one tale that will have you pondering possible events that could bring our precious world to an end. We’ve put together a fine and varied collection of stories about the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it just for you. Please, enjoy.

  Before I leave you, one more quick note. SFFWorld.com supports an international community. Though many of the authors included are from the United States of America, we also have a few from the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. British and U.S. spelling has been preserved (for the most part) in each story according to its author’s origin.

  Thanks for reading,

  N. E. White (cat herder)

  HUGH HOWEY

  Executable

  Hugh Howey is a self-published author. In 2011, his Wool series garnered national and international attention and has been optioned for a potential feature film by Ridley Scott and Steve Zaillian. When not writing, he likes to go for hikes with his family, take strolls on the beach, and read. Mr. Howey currently lives in Jupiter, Florida with his wife Amber and their dog Bella.

  We are becoming wired in ways we don't even realize. In Executable, Mr. Howey explores what might happen when something sinister reveals our connections.

  1. EXECUTABLE

  by Hugh Howey

  The council was quiet while they awaited his answer. All those on the makeshift benches behind him seemed to hold their breath. This is why they came here, to hear how it all began. How the end began. Jamal shifted nervously on the bamboo. He could feel his palms grow damp. It wasn’t the guilt of what his lab had released. It was how damn crazy it would all sound.

  “It was the Roomba,” he said. “That was the first thing we noticed, the first hint that something wasn’t right.”

  A flurry of whispers. It sounded like the waves nearby were growing closer.

  “The Roomba,” one of the council members said, the man with no beard. He scratched his head in confusion.

  The only woman on the council peered down at Jamal. She adjusted her glasses, which had been cobbled together from two or three different pairs. “Those are the little vacuum cleaners, right? The round ones?”

  “Yeah,” Jamal said. “Steven, one of our project coordinators, brought it from home. He was sick of the cheese puff crumbs everywhere. We were a bunch of programmers, you know? A lot of cheese puffs and Mountain Dew. And Steven was a neat freak, so he brought this Roomba in. We thought it was a joke, but . . . the little guy did a damn good job. At least, until things went screwy.”

  One of the council members made a series of notes. Jamal shifted his weight, his butt already going numb. The bamboo bench they’d wrangled together was nearly as uncomfortable as all the eyes of the courtroom drilling into the back of his skull.

  “And then what?” the lead councilman asked. “What do you mean, screwy?”

  Jamal shrugged. How to explain it to these people? And what did it matter? He fought the urge to turn and scan the crowd behind him. It’d been almost a year since the world went to shit. Almost a year, and yet it felt like a lifetime.

  “What exactly do you mean by ‘screwy,’ Mr. Killabrew?”

  Jamal reached for his water. He had to hold the glass in both hands, the links between his cuffs drooping. He hoped someone had the keys to the cuffs. He had wanted to ask that, to make sure when they snapped them on his wrists. Nowadays, everything was missing its accessories, it’s parts. It was like those collectible action figures that never had the blaster or the cape with them anymore.

  “What was the Roomba doing, Mr. Killabrew?”

  He took a sip and watched as all the particulate matter settled in the murky and unfiltered water. “The Roomba wanted out,” he said.

  There were snickers from the galley behind him, which drew glares from the council. There were five of them up there on a raised dais, lording over everyone from a wide desk of rough-hewn planks. Of course, it was difficult to look magisterial when half of them hadn’t bathed in a week.

  “The Roomba wanted out,” a councilwoman repeated. “Why? To clean?”

  “No, no. It refused to clean. We didn’t notice at first, but the crumbs had been accumulating. And the little guy had stopped beeping to be emptied. It just sat by the door, waiting for us to come or go, then it would scoot forward like it was gonna make a break for it. But the thing was so slow. It was like a turtle trying to get to water, you know? When it got out, we would just pick it up and set it back inside. Hank did a hard reset a few times, which woul
d get it back to normal for a little while, but eventually it would start planning its next escape.”

  “Its escape,” someone said.

  “And you think this was related to the virus.”

  “Oh, I know it was. The Roomba had a wireless base station, but nobody thought of that. We had all these containment procedures for our work computers. Everything was on an intranet, no contact to the outside world, no laptops, no cell phones. There were all these government regulations.”

  There was an awkward silence as all those gathered remembered with a mix of longing and regret the days of governments and their regulations.

  “Our office was in the dark,” Jamal said. “Keep that in mind. We took every precaution possible—”

  Half of a coconut was hurled from the gallery and sailed by Jamal, just missing him. He flinched and covered the back of his head. Homemade gavels were banged, a hammer with a broken handle, a stick with a rock tied on with twine. Someone was dragged from the tent screaming that the world had ended and that it was all his fault.

  Jamal waited for the next blow, but it never came. Order was restored amid threats of tossing everyone out onto the beach while they conducted the hearing in private. Whispers and shushes hissed like the breaking waves that could be heard beyond the flapping walls of the makeshift courthouse.

  “We took every precaution,” Jamal reiterated once the hall was quiet again. He stressed the words, hoped this would serve as some defense. “Every security firm shares certain protocols. None of the infected computers had internet access. We give them a playground in there. It’s like animals in a zoo, right? We keep them caged up.”

  “Until they aren’t,” the beardless man said.

  “We had to see how each virus operated, how they were executed, what they did. Every antivirus company in the world worked like this.”

  “And you’re telling us a vacuum cleaner was at the heart of it all?”

  It was Jamal’s turn to laugh. The gallery fell silent.

  “No.” He shook his head. “It was just following orders. It was—” He took a deep breath. The glass of water was warm. Jamal wondered if any of them would ever taste a cold beverage ever again. “The problem was that our protocols were outdated. Things were coming together too fast. Everything was getting networked. And so there were all these weak points that we didn’t see until it was too late. Hell, we didn’t even know what half the stuff in our own office did.”

  “Like the refrigerator,” someone on the council said, referring to their notes.

  “Right. Like the refrigerator.”

  The old man with the shaggy beard sat up straight. “Tell us about the refrigerator.”

  Jamal took another sip of his murky water. “No one read the manual,” he said. “Probably didn’t even come with one. Probably had to read it online. We’d had the thing for a few years, ever since we remodeled the break room. We never used the network functions. Hell, it connected over the power grid automatically. It was one of those models with the RFID scanner so it knew what you had in there, what you were low on. It could do automatic re-orders.”

  The beardless man raised his hand to stop Jamal. He was obviously a man of power. Who could afford to shave anymore? “You said there were no outside connections,” the man said.

  “There weren’t.” Jamal reached up to scratch his own beard. “I mean . . . not that we knew of. Hell, we never knew this function was even operational. For all I know, the virus figured it out and turned it on itself. We never used half of what that thing could do. The microwave, neither.”

  “The virus figured it out. You say that like this thing could learn.”

  “Well, yeah, that was the point. I mean, at first it wasn’t any more self-aware than the other viruses. Not at first. But you have to think about what kind of malware and worms this thing was learning from. It was like locking up a young prodigy with a hoard of career criminals. Once it started learning, things went downhill fast.”

  “Mr Killabrew, tell us about the refrigerator.”

  “Well, we didn’t know it was the fridge at first. We just started getting these weird deliveries. We got a router one day, a high-end wireless router. In the box there was one of those little gift cards that you fill out online. It said Power me up.”

  “And did you?”

  “No. Are you kidding? We thought it was from a hacker. Well, I guess it kinda was. But you know, we were always at war with malicious programmers. Our job was to write software that killed their software. So we were used to hate mail and stuff like that. But these deliveries kept rolling in, and they got weirder.”

  “Weirder. Like what?”

  “Well, Laura, one of our head coders, kept getting jars of peanuts sent to her. They all had notes saying Eat me.”

  “Mr Killabrew—” The bald man with the wispy beard seemed exasperated with how this was going. “When are you going to tell us how this outbreak began?”

  “I’m telling you right now.”

  “You’re telling us that your refrigerator was ordering peanuts for one of your co-workers.”

  “That’s right. Laura was allergic to peanuts. Deathly allergic. After a few weeks of getting like a jar a day, she started thinking it was one of us. I mean, it was weird, but still kinda funny. But weird. You know?”

  “Are you saying the virus was trying to kill you?”

  “Well, at this point it was just trying to kill Laura.”

  Someone in the gallery sniggered. Jamal didn’t mean it like that.

  “So your vacuum cleaner is acting up, you’re getting peanuts and routers in the mail, what next?”

  “Service calls. And at this point, we’re pretty sure we’re being targeted by hackers. We were looking for attacks from the outside, even though we had the thing locked up in there with us. So when these repair trucks and vans start pulling up, this stream of people in their uniforms and clipboards, we figure they’re in on it, right?”

  “You didn’t call them?”

  “No. The AC unit called for a repair. And the copy machine. They had direct lines through the power outlets.”

  “Like the refrigerator, Mr Killabrew?”

  “Yeah. Now, we figure these people are trying to get inside to hack us. Carl thought it was the Israelis. But he thought everything was the Israelis. Several of our staff stopped going home. Others quit coming in. At some point, the Roomba got out.”

  Jamal shook his head. Hindsight was a bitch.

  “When was this?” the councilwoman asked.

  “Two days before the outbreak,” he said.

  “And you think it was the Roomba?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. We argued about it for a long time. Laura and I were on the run together for a while. Before raiders got her. We had one of those old cars with the gas engines that didn’t know how to drive itself. We headed for the coast, arguing about what’d happened, if it started with us or if we were just seeing early signs. Laura asked what would happen if the Roomba had made it to another recharging station, maybe one on another floor. Could it update itself to the network? Could it send out copies?”

  “How do we stop it?” someone asked.

  “What does it want?” asked another.

  “It doesn’t want anything,” Jamal said. “It’s curious, if you can call it that. It was designed to learn. It wants information. We . . . ”

  Here it was. The truth.

  “We thought we could design a program to automate a lot of what the coders did. It worked on heuristics. It was designed to learn what a virus looked like and then shut it down. The hope was to unleash it on larger networks. It would be a pesticide of sorts. We called it Silent Spring.”

  Nothing in the courtroom moved. Jamal could hear the crashing waves. A bird cried in the distance. All the noise of the past year, the shattering glass, the riots, the cars running amok, the machines frying themselves, it all seemed so very far away.

  “This wasn’t what we designed, though,” he
said softly. “I think something infected it. I think we built a brain and we handed it to a roomful of armed savages. It just wanted to learn. Its lesson was to spread yourself at all costs. To move, move, move. That’s what the viruses taught it.”

  He peered into his glass. All that was left was sand and dirt and a thin film of water. Something swam across the surface, nearly too small to see, looking for an escape. He should’ve kept his mouth shut. He never should’ve told anyone. Stupid. But that’s what people did, they shared stories. And his was impossible to keep to himself.

  “We’ll break for deliberations,” the chief council member said. There were murmurs of agreement on the dais followed by a stirring in the crowd. The bailiff, a mountain of muscle with a toothless grin, moved to retrieve Jamal from the bench. There was a knocking of homemade gavels.

  “Court is adjourned. We will meet tomorrow morning when the sun is a hand high. At that time, we will announce the winners of the ration bonuses and decide on this man’s fate—on whether or not his offense was an executable one.”

  IGOR LJUBUNCIC

  Let’s See What Tomorrow Brings

  Igor Ljubuncic is a physicist by vocation and a Linux geek by profession. He is the founder and operator of the tech-oriented website Dedoimedo, and the author of The Betrayed, the first book in The Lost Words epic fantasy series. You can learn more about Igor's writing on The Lost Words Books website.

  How would you behave if you faced the end of the world? Stoically, gallantly, with respect for your fellow human beings? Perhaps, perhaps not. The inspiration for Let’s See What Tomorrow Brings comes from a deep, inner question -- what motivates us above all, against all fears, horrors, dangers, and above all, morality?

  2. LET’S SEE WHAT TOMORROW BRINGS

  by Igor Ljubuncic