THE BIG WHIMPER
(THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF REX, TWO MILLION CE)
Laird Barron
Playback interrupted. Assessing. Standby . . .
Quantum Fragment Record of Unknown Subject (1): —There is neither beginning nor end, only an endless ring of time. These fleeting images, these tachyon darts of thought, originate from a location in the far-flung past, or across a divide of dark matter during an epoch yet to come.
There is no time, no distance. No beginning, no end.
Cascade Failure. System Reset in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .
Unknown Subject (2): In the beginning, a hominid cracked two stones together and discovered fire. Fire drew me to a cave mouth on a cold night. You remember the soft flames, the scent of roasting elk, and how you slunk up into the cave, tail low, fangs bared. Starving. Canines have helped mankind fight other animals and men for a long time. You were right there, side by side for all the maiming and burning and conquering, muzzled in gore, ears pricked . . .
System Resetting. Standby . . .
UNK (3): —I snuffle-smell true-good. Enemies all around. Snap-bite! Breathe fire! Too many, too many. Breathe fire! Breathe . . .
System Reset Complete. Resume quantum playback:
We are surrounded by a forest. The canopy goes on for endless kilometers. Leaves drip in the gloomy coolness. Local time is a few minutes after sunrise, autumn of Two Million CE. I blink away the sensation I’ve nodded off and then returned to myself from across a gulf of eons and darkness.
A pale red light blinks behind my eye. A proximity alarm.
“—tell me your story, Spot,” says the Haunter of the Wood. He’s stated this request each time we meet. A ritual? A test? A figment of my increasingly disturbed subconscious?
“Spot is a slur. My name is Rex.” I rest my haunches near a hollow log where I sleep at night.
The Haunter visits at random intervals; perhaps to probe my security measures. Today, he occupies a patch of underbrush. An unctuous shadow whose red eyes glimmer, reminiscent of my own warning beacon. What could the Haunter be? He (it?) shifts as ink spilled into water shifts; changing, cycling through forms that are vaguely monstrous. My powerful nose whiffs nothing, an absence of scent. I choose not to look closer despite the fact I’m able to perceive a spectrum of light frequencies. Sometimes, ignorance is best. I’ve learned this lesson through painful experience. I’m also worried my vision will rebound, only revealing myself.
“Tell me your story so far, Rex. The end of Act One, the beginning of Act Two.”
I dislike the Haunter. His manner is overfamiliar. He might be dangerous. Possibly hostile. But I’m lonely.
“I was in the thick of a fight. World War Four. The tribes of Man squared off in a battle royale that raged for almost a decade.”
“What about World War Three?”
“As expected—an exchange of nukes and everybody said oops. Peace reigned for a while. Until the world was ready for Four. Civilizations developed nanotechnology, continental missile defense systems, biological counteragents. That meant it would be a real slog.”
“How did the war start?”
“Weren’t you there?”
“Yes and no.” The Haunter sounds coy. “I may have nodded off. Besides, I like how you tell it.”
“How does any war start?” I say. “A pebble becomes a landslide.”
“How did it end?”
“Deus ex Machina.”
“The Gray. As in the Gray Eminence.”
“Yes. Humans and their gallows humor.”
We both know the story by heart:
One day, an object resembling a planetoid entered our solar system. The way a slug just sort of shows up on one’s doorstep. It orbited Earth, and we soon discovered this planetoid was actually an invasion transport. Warring nations declared a truce and turned their attention to the heavens.
The aliens’ gravitational weapons wreaked havoc. Next, they disrupted the atmosphere by exciting global volcanic activity. Ash clouds blocked the sun, mimicking a nuclear winter. Human and animal populations were subsequently infected with a virulent pathogen via oxygen and water supplies. Infected organisms functioned as slaves of the invaders. Resistance was snuffed in its cradle. Instead of Armageddon, humanity curled into a ball and faded into oblivion.
“The world ended with a whimper,” the Haunter says as though I’ve narrated aloud.
“Clever.” I skip to the thrilling conclusion. “Several of my battalion who survived the initial chaos decided to make our exit in a blaze of glory. We rallied for a last stand against hordes of shambling zombies. My human mother wore scales of silver. Her guns cut apart a mountain. She’d overridden security protocols and brought my entire suite of combat systems online. I howled radioactive fire and our enemies charred. Before it got really good, the mountain fell on me.”
“And you died,” says the Haunter.
My internal warning light brightens. “Living entombment. Same difference, perhaps.”
“For the love of God, Montresor. Yet, here you are. Relic of antiquity.”
“Time passed, or so it appears. A spark animated me, and I revived. Dug through a few hundred million tons of rubble until I felt sunlight on my snout. Until I sniffed green grass and not decayed earth.”
“You’ve been awake for how long?”
“A while.” I refuse to admit the extent that my memory banks are fried. The Big Whimper may have been eons ago, but due to my decaying ability to discern subjective from objective time, I experience the war fresh every day. Sometimes, I can’t escape the feeling it never really ended.
“The sun is your sun,” the Haunter says. “However, the stars are no longer your stars. Nor the sky . . .”
“The land is old and new. Evil creeps through the forest. I’ve adapted.”
“As it ever was,” the Haunter says. “You are Rex. King of Dogs.”
“I’m the king of nothing. Dogs have gone extinct.”
“Wrong. Dingoes have returned to the southern continent. Painted dogs gather in the Sub-Saharan.”
“Jackals and hyenas, too,” I say with derision. “Foxes. Coyotes. None of these are proper canines. None are real dogs.”
“Been around this world once or twice and have yet to encounter your like—the size of a horse and erudite; girded by titanium alloys and microcircuitry. You’re sui generis. Good boy. Special boy. Are you real, though?”
“I bay at the moon. I roll in shit. The memory of every dog who ever lived flows in my blood.”
“More metal than flesh. A mind is divided between animal and machine. Odd that your masters imbued intricacy of thought in a fluffy weapon.”
“The masters worked in mysterious ways.”
“What a woofing contradiction. Did Geppetto make you? Did the Blue Fairy bring you alive?”
“The poet who claimed to contain multitudes had nothing on me.”
“In fact, I met Whitman,” the Haunter says. “Late one night in his youth. Vectored a tachyon stream right into his consciousness. Ages before the Big Whimper, of course. When the world was less complicated.”
This is a new conversational gambit. The alarm flashes faster, practically incandescent.
I play along. “Animal Heaven is hardly complicated. Creatures great and small struggle for survival as in the beginning before the advent of man. Simple, pure.”
“Poor doggo, this isn’t heaven. You aren’t even aware of how many times you’ve given up the ghost. On each occasion of your death, you are painstakingly rebuilt. Renewed. Perhaps stronger. Yet the split in your consciousness remains. A crack in the database, as it were. You forget events which you should not.”
“In addition to identifying roots and tubers, you’re an expert in quantum computers?”
“Gaze inward and behold the truth of my observation.”
Snorting, I initiate a search program. Lo and behold, I encounter a new data corruption in the neighborhood of a century prior. I say new because that “crack” in my database spreads slowly, yet inexorably. Checking the damage never occurs to me until the Haunter suggests I do so.
“See? You should perform internal diagnostics more often.” The Haunter’s tone indicates a smile. “Men are gone. Dogs are gone. The conquering devils are gone. Where did the Gray fuck off to, anyway?”
“Excellent question. I’ll ponder it on my morning stroll . . .”
“Since you’ll be out and about, I recommend a visit to Avaxia. She’s entertaining a new prisoner you’ll want to meet.”
“The Crimson Empire is keeping prisoners these days?”
“A human. Quite mysterious.”
No humans survived the last great war. At the last, entire populations lay in fruiting piles, deliquescing under a gray webbing that spanned continents. Humanity’s cities were reclaimed by wilderness. Its bones embedded in the earth. However, it seems pointless to argue with a talking Rorschach pattern, so I grunt noncommittally.
“Oh, and Spot?”
“Yes?”
“Talking to yourself is never a positive sign.” The Haunter’s voice fades into the susurration of the leaves, the creaking branches. Familiar, disquieting, gone.
I count two minutes, then power down my plasma beam and sonic weaponry. The red light slows, dims, and fades as my pounding heart settles into a normal rhythm. It would be easy to say the hell with antiquated notions of obligation, tuck my nose under my tail, and have a snooze. I resist such canine instincts and prepare for travel.
Later that morning, I kill an elk the traditional way—I punch auxiliary servos, accelerate to 120 kilometers per hour, and scatter the herd. An old bull turns to fight. I shear off his head before his nervous system can process the information. Meat is fuel. Fuel will be necessary for the expedition to come.
I lope southwest, out of the forest and across broken terrain, and the earth changes. Boulders and sand and occasional dunes. The sand is as red as grains flowing from a titan’s splintered hourglass. To the east, the reconfigured Atlantic wallows, icy dark. Horrors roll in its depths, according to screeching gulls. Due west, more forests and plains. Bison have returned and saber-toothed cats to hunt them. Wetlands lie to the south—cypress jungles and everglades ruled by monstrous lizards and great predatory birds. Farther south spread lush, rotting jungles where I’d rather not tread for fear of the spiders, centipedes, and other, worse, slithering abominations. The analytical part of my consciousness protests the falsity of this strange world, the sterile, yet fecund nature of its composition into a diverse set of biomes. Biomes arranged meticulously as a biologist’s terrarium . . .
Doubts plague me. Even at my best, I’d be ill equipped to grapple mysteries of weird biomes and vanished aliens. My mind threatens to spin in circles; chasing its tail, as it were. I’m forgetful and paranoid. The Haunter is correct—my repair protocols are miraculous, but the flaw originating at the quantum level, the core of my essence, may present an insurmountable obstacle. In that case, my consciousness will steadily degrade. I’ll regress to a feral animal and sooner or later, die alone in this wilderness. Does it even matter? What is a dog without a master?
Onward through the desert. One paw in front of the next for lack of any better course of action. Eventually, conical mounds, scoured and bleached, thrust upward, borehole mouths pointed at the sun. Here is the northernmost colony of the Crimson, an empire that spans thousands of kilometers. Its formicating denizens detest the cold. Perhaps they’ll call it quits here and expand no farther. Ravenous and bellicose, are these devils. I fear they will adapt to harsher climes. And then woe unto the soft woodland creatures. I won’t be able to live in my hollow log, that’s for sure. Workers measure thirty centimeters, end-to-end. Warriors are conservatively double that. Armored in chitin and bearing venomous stingers. Their serrated mandibles are deadly sharp.
I rest at a marginally safe distance from a trio of the largest mounds—each six meters vertical, and similarly broad around the base. In this instance, “safe” merely indicates I’ll stand a chance of burning a few ants before they shred me to a fine meal. Several warriors emerge and twitch their antennae agitatedly, but don’t rush forward to attack. The dwellers of the mounds are in dread of fire and they’ve seen me bellow the lambent flames of my lost tribe. It’s a shaky deterrent I prefer not to rely upon overmuch.
Sand vibrates under my paws. Grains form binary code—pointillist mosaics of quickly erased zeroes and ones. Simultaneously, a shrill whisper penetrates my consciousness. Thus, Princess Avaxia, who inhabits a cavern far beneath the surface, makes her presence felt.
Rex, lovely Rex. Your luxurious fur, caked in gore. Your succulent muscle, marbled with fat! Our warriors salivate with fury and lust. Speak with haste, O lovely-loathsome vertebrate. Hers is an unnerving harmony of many buzzing voices that causes me to reflexively scratch my ear.
“Greetings, Princess. My reactor is charged. My unholy fire is stoked. If your servants become too randy, I’ll glass this entire region. I’ll sink your mounds into the earth and bury you alive. Your children’s children will glow in the dark.”
That live burial threat sounds personal.
“Test me and find out.”
We converse in friendship, Rex. We eagerly await the purpose of your visit. Speak, speak!
“I’ve come to examine your prisoner. Humans are a particular interest of mine.”
Human? We have yet to determine the creature’s species. Our experiments leave us with questions. This . . . being resembles Homo sapiens. It does not smell as it should. It smells unnatural.
Princess Avaxia’s comments are intriguing. The colony’s genetic memory, heightened by various mutations, is much longer than mine, extending to the arrival of the first ant while supercontinents had yet churned and steamed. She would recognize a human by sight and smell, to say nothing of her ability to extract the surface thoughts of sentient creatures.
I have an epiphany. “This being repels your attempts to pry into its mind. It’s a blank slate.”
A void. Beyond our reckoning.
“Where did you find this individual?”
Nearby, in a cavern. Our workers were excavating an egg chamber and broke into a cell.
“Immobile? Trapped? Damaged?”
Immobile, albeit not trapped. Inert, but undamaged. Hibernating. It is aware, yet refuses to communicate.
“Allow me to act as your consultant in this matter,” I say.
After a long pause, she says, Only because it amuses us. You may approach.
I advance into the shadow of the tri-mounds. My weapons are primed. Death rays: sonic, laser, and plasma. Fangs powerful enough to rend the majority of earthly metals, naturally occurring or forged. Slash a hole through my hide or gouge my armor plating, nanobots will seal it; cut off my limb, those trusty nanobots will grow me another. Alas, there are limits to the force I can bring to bear. My regenerative capabilities are finite while the colony’s warriors are innumerable. Engagement will presage mutual destruction. Battle stimulants dump into my bloodstream. I tremble ever so slightly.
Ants geyser forth. Dark and thick as coursing blood, the denizens of the colony pour downward and gather in rapidly widening pools. The leftmost swarm drags an object, its contours obscured by clambering bodies. The captive figure becomes distinct as individual ants retreat from where they’ve clung to its body. A man sits lotus, limbs pinioned by a few of the largest and strongest warriors. His proportions are unnerving—his torso is lengthy, and grotesquely thin. He wears tatters of an expensive suit popular during the twentieth century. Though ants have chewed him viciously, his aspect is serene. Bone gleams through ragged wounds. Grinning teeth gleam too. His wet eyes shine with the ancient awareness of a newborn.
The man’s scent wafts over me. Chill, antiseptic, numbing. Charnel reek wrapped in cotton candy. The odor doesn’t register as an olfactory sensation; instead, it hits psychically. Two million years have passed since I last whiffed that cloying tang of nothingness.
Sand trickles from his mouth. “So,” he says. “We meet again.”
I, dread and terrible Rex, loose a hot torrent of piss.
Needless to say, the little red alarm is blinking like mad.
This ghoulish apparition possesses a litany of names, but favors Tom. He is a herald of malignance, of doom and destruction. A harbinger of woe. He has claimed to ride dinosaurs and fuck Neanderthals. He has professed to walk in the shadows of countless worlds. I imagine he chuckled when his minions rent my mother limb from limb. My mother and her scientist friends theorized he was sent to this world as a scout; a watcher who predates most organisms, yet anticipated Homo sapiens and patiently waited for the species to collectively ripen.
A growl rumbles in my chest. My rational self is in danger of surrendering to my brute self, which would be a suboptimal condition. I do my best fighting while calm and focused. The canine in me would run for the hills. If I turn my back on Tom, I’ll die. Possibly for real.
I project images to Princess Avaxia: a composite of Tom in his manifold guises, the latter of which saw him portraying the role of representative of a global corporation during the alien invasion. He’d spoken on behalf of his corporation in favor of the Gray, imploring humanity to acquiesce, to submit peacefully, quietly, painlessly. He’d insisted that the invaders were benevolently disposed toward the peoples of Earth. An unnecessary bit of subterfuge, given the power differential. I am convinced that he and his kind derive pleasure from cruelty and betrayal.
By now the psychic fog must be lifting. Surely Avaxia recognizes the horror nestled to the bosom of her colony. Tom is eager to be seen, to be known.
The princess buzzes and clicks stridently. We are confused. Why did we not recognize this abomination?
“Such is his power,” I say through bared fangs, my gaze still focused upon my old enemy. “To obscure his nature. To cloud the minds of men and beasts.”
“Rex.” Tom’s voice is mellow and resonant. Elocution has ever been his superpower. “Alone at last.” His body isn’t flesh; his bones aren’t bones; he possesses nary a drop of blood. Currently, he inhabits the form of an animatronic puppet whose human likeness is several degrees this side of the uncanny valley. I can only describe it as an oversized construct that visitors to an amusement park might’ve seen, back in the days of amusement parks and people. When the Gray descended upon Earth, they’d obscured themselves via electromagnetics and psychic hoodoo. Now I’ve an inkling of what hid behind those distortion fields—shambling, emaciated puppets. Some grinning, some blank as stone, each broadly similar to Tom.
“Why have you returned? There’s nothing left. You’ve done your worst.” I don’t expect an answer, inching backward, stalling the inevitable.
“Man’s best friend.” An observation? An accusation?
“Yes.” I eke a few more centimeters.
“Man’s best friend.”
“Yes.”
“Man’s best friend. Man’s best friend. Man’s. Best. Friend.”
The void, Avaxia says. The cold is spreading. The void is hungry. We have made a grave mistake bringing this one among us. Rend, devour, annihilate! She commands her forces, and they respond, eager for battle. Warriors act as a singular entity. Their massed presence gathers like a wave, then crashes upon Tom. They sting and bite. They crawl into his mouth and gouge his unblinking eyes.
He ignores his peril. “Best friend. Best friend.”
I recalculate my options. Join the attack or get while the getting is good?
Flee, Rex. We don’t want your lambent flame nor your thunderous bark. Begone, hound.
I’m in full reverse, scrambling up a huge dune; prelude to turning 180 degrees and hitting the servos. Ants have piled atop the motionless figure while rivers more swarm to hurl their numbers into the fray.
Avaxia wails. She’s intimately connected to her servants and thus detects a precipitous shift in the struggle moments before I observe Tom’s blackened shape jolt, unfold, and rise to full height, almost a giant at three meters. The air shimmers around him, stirred by a semivisible current. His long, thin shadow stretches near my frantically churning paws.
“An ape-man’s best friend, too?” He brushes his shoulders and chest. His spindly hands are enormous. Ants fall away in smoking clumps. Columns of warriors crisp into flame in a perfect circle around him. The scorched circle rapidly widens to encompass the onrushing host, reducing its numbers to charred husks on contact. Acid mist drifts above the carnage. The greenish pall is streaked with white-vapor death’s heads.
Avaxia’s screams pitch into nosebleed decibels.
“No coincidences, Rexy,” Tom says. Mangled thoraxes, legs, and mandibles dribble down his chin. “I waited in that hole forever. Just to tell you time is a ring. Follow the big river to where it bends around the foot of Mystery Mountain.”
Cracks shoot in every direction, including mine. Rocky earth collapses and leaves him standing atop a lone pillar. Two of the mounds topple, then slide into the abyss. Ants beyond counting tumble after, end over end into the black.
“If you love primates, scoot, doggy. I’ll give you to the count of a thousand!”
Wheeling, I engage the afterburners. I sprint and sprint onward until foam curdles in my jaws. The ground softens into green. Green grass, green hills, stands of poplar. Avaxia’s despairing cries echo in my head for a long while. Her voice ceases abruptly. I howl once in sympathy and lope faster. Occasionally, I glance backward, and my shadow seems to double.
Common sense dictates I aim myself due north and run until I plunge into a snowbank. Programming supersedes the flight instinct. I head west toward Mystery Mountain instead. Tom’s mocking words serve as a call and response mnemonic. “Ape-men.” Yes, I harbor a faint recollection of interacting with hominids. Evolution continues to do its work in the face of setbacks. I’m compelled to investigate.
“What is a dog without a master?” The Haunter echoes the very question I frequently ask myself. “You’ve rescued the tribe on several occasions.” He is the right-flank shadow that vanishes if I turn my head to regard him. “A pterosaur threatened their existence. Before that, a pack of killer hyenas. Before that, a hive of giant wasps. Vampire bats. Carnivorous jelly. Evil beetles. Et cetera. It’s always something. And every time, you climb off the mat and rescue some kid from a well.”
And after I play my role in this episodic loop? I succumb to “death” only to reincarnate when the moment is opportune.
The river rolls sluggishly across a plain. A mountain looms in the middle distance. I bound along the bank, wary of lurking predators. The contours of the land and its rich, earthy aroma are familiar. Unfortunately, data corruption has erased any prior recordings of the area.
“Think,” the Haunter continues. “Use the partition that houses your logic. You’ve been a . . . patsy.”
“Didn’t you send me here?” I’m panting hard.
“Sent, no. Suggested, yes.”
“Suggested . . . Manipulated.”
“You’re suffering early onset dementia, dog. Somebody has to keep you on task.”
“And you’re elected, eh?”
“Guess who I am. The answer may surprise you.” He flickers in my peripheral vision, then vanishes.
I enter a shallow valley near the base of the mountain. Whatever occurred in the past, it’s immediately evident I made an impression upon the local cave dwellers. Soaring cliffs are carved and painted in shockingly vivid hues. My graven image joins the obligatory depictions of sun and moon and animal populations—little stick warriors hurling spears at a large, stylized stick dog. The caricature doesn’t appear to retaliate. Subsequent tableaus show man and beast allied in combat against a variety of horrors (corresponding to the Haunter’s summary), then, at last, reposed near a fire, triumphantly sharing the meat of a bison. A timeless tale that stirs my nostalgia.
Unfortunately, as I draw near the cliffs, the tribespeople scurry into their caves. Diminutive, sinewy specimens who speak a glottal, hooting language unknown to my records. Most wear animal skins. The more adventurous among them wing flinthead spears at me via relatively sophisticated atlatls. Damned accurately, too.
Why the rude welcome? First hint: the recent drawings of a tall, lanky silhouette grinning its face off. Upon closer inspection, the newest sequence of paintings illustrates the silhouetted giant bestowing gifts of knowledge upon the ape-men, including the aforementioned atlatls. Apparently, he created a myth wherein dogs are inherently treacherous and the Rex behemoth returns to massacre everyone. The final bit is a painting of Tom heroically shielding the tribe as fire shoots out of my eyes and jaws. A black disk partially eclipses the sun. Presumably Tom’s friends observing the battle from the mothership.
“Pterosaurs, beetles, hyenas,” the Haunter chants. “Who, or what, could be the next contestant?”
“The doom that came to Ape-Man Towne,” I muse aloud.
“Might you be Godzilla, menacing a primitive Tokyo? Might you be the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem?”
I regard the paintings of the giant and his supplicants. “Better question: Is Tom Prometheus? Is he the serpent who upended Eden’s status quo?”
“Titans and conniving serpents are small fry. Keep going . . .”
“A god.”
“Or what passes for a god in these parts,” says the Haunter. He’s finally acquired my sense of humor, my rasping voice. Probably my noble demeanor and charm as well.
“Friend, I feel as if you’ve led me by the snout.” I’m addressing the empty air. He’s done his job. Our conversations have triggered a regenerative burst and a web of fresh neural pathways that permit me to connect the abstract details floating in my mind. I’m fully online and coming to grips with the horrible implications of my existence. This clarity of purpose isn’t a state likely to persist for long. So, I ignore the terrified tribespeople and stalk through their groveling masses and deep into the mountain lair.
The cave system is vast and cunningly engineered. The latter is revealed by my keen vision and surface-penetrating radar. I see past rough tunnels, blackened by the soot of many campfires; past the illusion of naturally sculpted grottos and forests of stalactites. I crouch at the rim of a sacrificial pit where the ape-men toss in the old and weak, same as their ancestors did in places such as Sima de los Huesos, circa 430,000 BCE. Nothing really changes when it comes to humans and protohumans, although in this case, that’s because the Gray put a thumb on the scale. Men and animals gone extinct in the wake of World War IV haven’t revived in accordance with Mother Nature’s failsafe protocols. Life hasn’t simply carried on. There is a grimmer explanation.
We never knew why the Gray attacked. I wasn’t around to see them depart. Seems crystal clear that while the main force came and went, they left Tom behind to carry on their inscrutable work.
I venture down and down into the pit, among the bones. Down and down where none of the ape-men would dare go into a realm of sacred darkness. At the bottom, buried in slime and sediment, lies a hatch sealed by bolts and biometric locks. I rend it asunder with these alloy claws. Beneath the hatch? A hive of laboratories whose functions generally defy my comprehension.
The cloning vats, I recognize. Ape-men, Cro-Magnon, and Homo sapiens float in the brine, dreaming as they await their turn to repopulate the planet. I have a basic grasp of molecular printing tech as well. Judging by the shiny holograms and scale-model metropolises of old Earth cities, Tom has the tools to mass replicate any civilization at any moment in human history. Or prehistory. He could literally snap his fingers and wipe away one reality to embed another. He might wear the body of a puppet, but the rest of us are his playthings.
Proud to say, I don’t hesitate to assume the role of Samson in Dagon’s temple. I access the pocket dimension where my bulk (my true form is the size and density of a tank, or briefly, a battleship) and heaviest armaments are stored and then unleash the arsenal. Masers, lasers, plasma beams, infrasound, chemical agents, and low-yield nukes. The whole shebang. The subterranean complex plunges into the resultant crater. Fires of hell erupt, whooshing through the upper cave system. Nary an ape-man, woman, or child escapes the conflagration. It’s the destruction of the ant colony revisited.
Sorry to prove Tom a prophet, my hapless ape-man friends.
The ordeal isn’t quite enough to kill me outright. I emerge from this latest apocalypse half-charred and dragging my entrails in the dirt. Every nuke detonated, every gun emptied, and all nanobots depleted. I sprawl near the river and watch the top of Mystery Mountain rocket into the stratosphere.
Tom arrives by and by, whistling cheerfully. “Saw your mold in the factory, huh?” he says. “Figured that might be the last straw to break your programming . . . What a fascinating report this will be. Thanks, Rex.”
In fact, I hadn’t spotted my master clone among the myriad others. No matter—a younger dog might’ve stuck to orthodoxy and tried to save the tribe. Not this one. Blowing everything to Kingdom Come, including myself, was the only valid choice. At any rate, done is done. Splattered in gore and lather, wheezing slower and slower; my eyelids droop.
Time is a ring. The Big Whimper occurred two million years ago, two minutes ago, two minutes from now, two million years from now. It’ll never happen. It’ll persist forever. What Tom may or may not know, is that I’m sui generis. Humans made me, in their infinite hubris, a walking, talking, tail-wagging doomsday device. If a mountain hadn’t conked my skull before I could uncork the break-glass-in-case-of-emergency tools, the whimper might’ve been a bang. Maybe Tom has no reason to feel threatened. I think he should. One of us will soon find out who’s right. I shot all my nukes . . . all except one.
The smug bastard leans over to pat me. “Who’s a good boy?”
Wish you could see the look on his face when my head whips up and my jaws go snicker-snack! and Tom is suddenly minus his right hand. Who’s a good boy? Me; I’m a good boy. I’m good. Good. Boy. Good—
Playback interrupted. Cascade failure imminent. Searching for signal . . .
Quantum Fragment Record of Unknown Subject (1): Dad worked at an animation studio affiliated with several famous film companies. He rigged puppets, all sorts of stuff. Brought home a helmet in the shape of a coyote head. Lifelike as shit. Its jaws moved with Dad’s. The ears pricked up and swiveled around like a real animal too. Terrifying. He designed other models. Creepy, awful. Exaggerated, animatronic features of babies and old people. Not just heads, either. He and a partner put together entire costumes with articulated limbs and fangs and claws.
One of the costumes resembled a notorious corporate spokesperson, except freakishly tall. Almost shit myself when Dad climbed inside and lurched around the yard, kicking the doghouse to splinters and uprooting Mom’s rosebushes. He saw me hiding near the corner of the house. That . . . thing grinned and reached down for me—
UNK (2): You don’t sleep. Which means you don’t dream. Subroutines take over when you slip into a low energy state. They process information—all the information ever recorded by human civilization suspended in amber—and some of that information is expressed via sequenced imagery traveling at tachyon velocity. An eternal data stream that meets itself coming and going.
You neither sleep nor dream. But the animal within you does. He’s having a doozy when a small red light clicks on in the corner of his vision. The light blinks.