It was the first thing that Wilf heard from the wild man outside the TV Station.
“God BLESS the Scottish! Andrew Marvin! PLEASEDTAMEETCHA” He pumped Wilf’s hand as if he thought it would push Wilf into speaking like one primes a water pump.
“I’m glad to meet you, Mister Marvin. Wilf Broadericz” Wilf looked the man in the eye and gripped back with as much enthusiasm as he could muster.
“Broadericz, eh? Are you a Commie?”
“No, Sir! I’m a former GI and fought for OUR SIDE in the War!” Wilf nearly shouted. He’d been used to ribbing about his name, but his family had been in America almost as long as Texas. He bristled at any suggestion he was anything less than a Patriot.
“Hold on! Hey!” Mr. Marvin Raised his hands “I was only joshing, you wouldn’t be standing here if there was any question if you loved your Uncle Sam!”
Mr. Marvin gestured to the double doors behind him, up 3 short steps, and began to lead Wilf to the Door. “Son, you are gonna go in there, meet your future and you and I are going to be working together, I tell you what.”
The Foyer of the TV Station was a wide space with a single wide desk in the modern style with a pretty young lady sitting at it. Behind her a single giant Television (nearly 24 inches!) sat on a pedestal behind her showing what was being shown on television at the time.
She looked up as Wilf approached and held out a black rectangle towards him: “Mr. Broadericz! Here’s your pass for the building. You will be photographed and given a printed ID card in the future, hold onto that pass for the time being.”
Mister Marvin nodded to stairs that led up into the dim second floor on either side of the room, Wilf followed and they ascended into the offices of the TV Station. Mr. Marvin lead Wilf to an office at the end of the corridor, opening the door and stepping into the room and opening some blinds.
“Your office, Wilf.” He gestured around the nicely appointed room, with space to entertain and an impressive oak desk with well appointed shelves and cabinets around the room. At the corner between the two windows there was another monster TV facing into the room.
Mr. Marvin pointed to a book on the desk, “right there is your manual for working here at the Station. Read it today, take notes if you need them, it DOES NOT LEAVE this office, nor do you take home notes. You leave your life outside at the door and you leave your time in here at the door when you leave. This is the MOST important rule here at the Station and it’s why I’m telling you it before you read it again on the first page of that Manual.”
Wilf nodded solemnly “I had heard security was tight, but I had no idea it would be opsec tight.”
Mister Marvin stepped close “Look kid, we didn’t recruit you because we were impressed with your KP skills. I need say no more?”
Wilf got the picture, he was referring to his time as an intelligence asset behind enemy lines and his experience with OSI.
There was nothing more to say, Wilf sat at his desk, took in the view and then set to reading the Manual for his new Job.
Being a Public Servant is a Big Job. You are supposed to go out into the world, find what’s broken and fix it within a series of ever-changing rules set alternatively by people who are disinterested and overly concerned. Fred worked as a Bureaucrat at the “pleasure” of a Government Minister, and who his boss is changes from Election to Election (and lately with the wind!) So Fred never knew who he was “Pleasing” these days. He kept his head down and just got on with work. In his current role, he was a Safety Inspector for Public Housing and Private Housing Safety Enforcement.
He spent most days driving out to various places, doing a basic inspection of houses and schools and getting engineers involved if he thought they were needed. The County used Private Engineering firms rather than employing an Engineer full time, so there was never lack of Engineers, but some times the County “got what it paid for” with the Cheaper Services.
Fred strolled from his car, having finally arrived at Hrenville at the far eastern edge of his usual patch. It smelled of apples and wood-smoke when he walked to the school building, an older structure but built of heavy, post-war materials with none of the retrofits that added Air Conditioning or even a Heating Boiler to the building. It was heated with a series of wood-burning fires around the building, the roof was studded with small chimneys. It was a house of horrors for anyone seeking a more modern life, but it was a haven of “old time” life for the people of Hrenville who kept things like this as a kind of Tourist Trap, much to the chagrin of any new Teacher or Doctor who is unfortunate enough to find themselves assigned here.
Funny enough, they never have trouble getting new Priests into town if one passes on. Fred had been visiting the town for years, and knew who the movers and shakers were in town, but he was never greeted with anything more than indifference, not malice. The people of Hrenville went about their lives, keeping their picturesque corner of the county ready for visitors and hosting various festivals and celebrations and historical re-enactors and the like.
The Town was home to only 2 small Motels, with visitors driving into to town from the more Modern cities just down the road. It was in a vast field bound on all sides by forests and rivers, it was uphill from flood plains and downhill in terms of water flow for the aquifer so it has a great water system and never lacks for farmland around it, but not a single part of the massive flat field is tilled, with the town council insisting that it all be kept flat and green for visitors.
Fred walked around the School, looking for signs of damage, or structural issues. He liked to do this alone, without someone from inside to guide him to or from issues. He took out his flashlight and peered into the shadows around the school buildings structure, looking for reflections in standing water where it shouldn’t be, looking for shadows where there should be solid wood, that kind of thing. Satisfied that from a ground level, the building’s exterior looked okay, Fred dusted himself off, straightened himself and walked into the cool, concrete and wood interior of the Hrenville School.
The halls echoed with the hushed noises of a school in session, teachers and students talking everywhere in the large building. Somewhere in the building children sang a song, but Fred couldn’t pick up the tune or the words, only that children were singing. The Main office was to the left of the main entrance and a brass touchplate next to the door with words inscribed in it (long warn) was smooth and polished from 40+ years of students and teachers tapping it as they passed. Fred, a fan of tradition, tapped the plate as he passed and greeted Mrs. Belen, the school administrator and the power behind the office of the Principal Miss. Belen (he daughter).
Fred! It’s so nice to see you! She smiled and stood up from her desk to greet Fred. She wrapped him up in her arms and kissed him warmly on both cheeks. She had been Principal before and had a habit of treating every adult that came through the doors like lost children of her own.
Fred accepted the warmth and hugged Mrs. Belen back, returning her warmth with his own good nature. Mrs. Belen, I’m here for an inspection of the building, I’ll be wandering around the building looking at the structure and the chimney stacks. I’ll need a ladder to get up on top of the building at some point today and expect to be out of your hair before the school day is out. Will you be coming around with me today?
Mrs. Belen released Fred and walked around the office and swept with her arms to some posters on the wall opposite announcing “Saint Anthony’s Days” bearing a Date range starting today.
I’m sorry, Fred. We’re going to be busy today with the Children’s Saint Anthony’s Days activities. Mrs. Belen loved to come on the inspections, mostly because she had been the Principal for so long that she had a deep love for the building and all the kids that had passed through. But Saint Anthony was the town Patron Saint and around Hrenville was big on celebrating, every year they spent more and more time on the big Festival for their Patron Saint, so Fred wasn’t surprised that he would be working alone today.
Fred tapped the touch-plate as Mrs. Belen waved at his back, leaving the office. He wandered the halls, lighting the corners and the cracks, noting where there were some concerns in his notebooks. Classes let out and Fred stood to the side, waving friendly waves to teachers he recognized and enduring the stares and whispers of curious children. The Hrenvile School only served Kindergarten through Grade 6, the children were all uniformly small children to Fred and they blended into a somewhat dirty mass. As they swarmed out of the building into the air and the grassy fields outside.
With the Children out of the way Fred could make a pass of the classrooms looking for obvious issues and trying to find any issues with the fireplaces, thankfully centrally located off the Central Cross of the building. He lingered around the fireplaces, cold in the late spring. He could hear the same singing he heard earlier, the voices sounded bored and distracted now, there was a keening tone under it now that he hadn’t heard at all before.
He played his light along the ceilings as he finished a circuit of the whole cross, looking into each room, listening to the distant sounds of children playing and the singing never seeming to get louder or softer as he went around the building.
Fred Stopped.
The Singing never changed in volume.
He walked the length of the cross two times and never found the singers got closer or further away, nor did the singing stop, it was a constant childish chant of some kind. He strode back into office and found a gaggle of giggling children in the corner of the room, they were pulling ribbons from a sack of some ki…
Mrs Belen was on her back in the corner, he face already slack but stuck with a look of horror and wonder all at once staring up at the ceiling as laughing children with arms streaked in gore pulled at her intestine and slurped from them like mad milkshakes.
Fred dashed right, shouldering the door to Miss Belen’s private office and slamming the door behind him. The Singing had reached new volumes and the keening had become a shrieking that he could feel in his head more than hear anymore, scratching at the inside of his head like a trapped thought with claws.
Miss Belen’s office was empty, she wasn’t in at all. The Children had apparently not even seen Fred dash into the office, consumed as they were with their meal. He could hear children outside, playing some games, he could hear snatches of what was being said now and what he thought was “childish screaming” might have been something much worse. He chanced a look out the window over the grass fields and under a wide banner announcing “Saint Anthony’s Day at Hrenville School” he saw groups of under-12s felling adults in the field and tearing into them, like candy filled Paper models.
The singing had become a somber, atonal drone all around him now, neither rising in volume or pitch. He could feel a hot presence in the school; his back was soaked with sweat from the fear and the blazing heat that had sprung up everywhere. In the distance he could see smoke coming from buildings around town, the chaos in the school field was not just here.
Hrenville was a candy store of gore now. Children skipped trailing lengths of intestine, slurping happily from them as they squeezed every drop from them into their waiting mouths. He watched a small boy, no more than 5 eagerly squeeze a liver and suck at it to drain it into him. He wiped his mouth with a bloody back of his hand and sped off to find a new meal.
Fred couldn’t see his car, he was at the side of the building, away from the entrance. There were kids everywhere and while they hadn’t seen him yet, he had no idea if he could get away without them pulling him down and eating him raw.
Fear pricked him as the wall next to him collapsed and fell away in a cloud of dust and huge arm slid around him and dragged him off his feet and swung him like a ragdoll as he was carried into the rafters of the building to a chapel, hidden between the chimneys, were a group of the older girls circled Miss Belen, who was in a trance of sorts. The large arms let him down and he found himself looking at a massive Man-Shaped thing that was at least 8 feet tall stooped amongst the roof and wood, staring down at him with an amiable look on its face.
Miss Belen looked up, directly into Fred’s eyes and said: ‘Fred. You’re Late this year!”
The Girls tittered to each other and shushed at a gesture from Miss Belen.
Fred, if you had come last week, like you normally would, you’d have missed the whole thing. Miss Belen stood and smoothed her simple back skirt. The Singing and the screaming had all stopped. There was a silence from outside that did nothing to break the tension in the circular chapel.
With a wave, the man-thing was brought to attention and it pinned Fred down between the girls, who looked down at him with undisguised hunger.
It was going to be “Me” as the final “Snack” for today, a final sacrifice for Hrenville to continue, but now, Fred. Fred held up a hand, as if to say “no need to explain”
However, in that hand was a pistol that he had been carrying for years, ever since a helpful mayor had once tried to shake him down.
Fred didn’t even hesitate, he shot the Man-Thing dead between the eyes and shot up, scattering hungry kids and pushing Miss Belen out of the way. He found the stairs the girls and teacher had used and ran at full speed from the school firing into the faces of the cutest kids he had every seen and diving into his car, slamming it into reverse and fully flattening some kindergartners with his car as he rolled over them and peeled out to the highway. He never looked back, or dropped the pistol.
Once he had driven far enough, he put the pistol down on the passenger seat, pulled over and checked over the car, looking for evidence of the kids bodies and finding only bloody marks, he wiped them with wipes from his car and drove as calmly as possible to the nearest police station in Rempton just 10 minutes away.
A torn “Saint Anthony’s Days” banner hung over the road as he came to town and he slowed down only to see a police officer being set upon by teenagers like a pride of lions.
Oh, he thought, Hrenville Teens go to school at Rempton middle school, don’t they.
He saw a bus on fire in the distance and thought better of stopping anywhere he might find a kid from Hrenville.
Investigators were shocked at the sheer number of skulls found in the house of 58-year-old Dallas resident, Henry Waltham. A prominent voice in the online Q movement, Mr. Waltham had been a vocal supporter of the notion that “Democrats” were abducting Children for use in occult practices.
He had escaped notice for years, living alone in a large house in a tawny subdivision. He was finally discovered by a lawn maintenance crew that had mistakenly begun work in his back yard instead of a neighbor and happened to look in the window depicted in this artist concept image.
Merced Ruis was doing a quick circle of the yard checking for things in the grass when he noticed the unusual shapes in the window, looking closer he couldn’t miss the skulls in the darkened room, nor the photos of missing people on every wall. He stepped away from the window and called over his co-workers who all agreed that the room was very disturbing.
It was less than 24 hours later that police investigators opened the hidden door that led to the room and were met with the evidence that Henry “Hank” Waltham, far from being a “God-Fearing Christian” was in fact a deeply evil, child killing “Necromancer” who had been hiding among the members of Q online for years now.
The Local GOP also disavowed him, despite him being the precinct captain for 30 years.
After 10,000 years, the Anchorite was forced to leave the keep for the first time. They strode from the floor of the Tower, mostly fallen. A Siege from outside of the atmosphere led to the fall of every traditional and esoteric defense, not a siege screen remained between the Tower and the rest of the Universe; and the Anchorite was forced to take matters into their own hands.
With a wave of their hands, 10,000 years of ghosts rose around them, spreading like angry smoke with purpose. Their personal guard stood in their shadow, weapons of an age forgotten at the ready to dispose of anything that came within their sight. They two stood in the ruin of a fort that had stood longer than any being had lived. A last bastion on a planet left behind by history when Humankind left the Sol system to join a Galaxy and Universe beyond.
The Anchorites took up the task of “being humanity” on an empty planet left to itself in a corner of the Galaxy that was forgotten by its children. The distances between Earth and the rest of Humanity meant that at random periods Humans who had never heard of Earth and no longer spoke with languages that even resembled earth languages or speech at all would come across “a perfect world” for humans and learn that Earth was no longer “For” humanity.
Now, after a siege that came from points outside of the solar system, the last of Humanity faces destruction at the hands of children who have forgotten that this was their home.
People don’t even remember when it stopped being night time. It’s been so long since it’s been Dark Outside that people have forgotten what it was like to go outside and not have it be so bright.
The had to turn up all the lights in the city to make them stand out, because when you look up in the sky now it’s just white, white, white endless white like the whole world is inside a big white empty.
Scientists were brought on TV to explain what was going on, but they all kind of have nothing to say and the astronomers all gave up trying. They say that even radio scopes can’t see as far as the moon anymore, but we still have tides and so on so they think the moon is still there.
There’s no night anymore, so animals that need that day/night cycle started dying off, but a lot of the animals adapted, which is great to hear. The lack of night caused crime to really change, only the most bold or violent criminals are operating outside anymore. The Cameras that cops demanded are REALLY effective now, because they always have full light.
That’s the other thing, while it’s nice that it’s light out, it hasn’t rained in forever, but we’re not in a drought. The phrase “Closed System” has been tossed around on the Internet recently.
After months of silence and the relative quiet of a Summer without Laughs, the Joker reappeared in Gotham with a crime that shocked the Theater Community to the Core. The Whole of Gotham’s Stage Actors Guild found itself without work and off stage in September when The Batman released a statement implicating “The Joker” in the deaths of Daliah Von Seraph and Timothy Risseraud, leads from “All Greeks And Crooks” which had just started it’s run in Gotham.
The two leads had been making headlines as masked clowns who fell in love while taking part in a Greek Tragedy revival, a Chorus, within a play. On that fateful night the pair had been deep in the show-stopping “We’re only clowns for money, we’re lovers forever” song when they both lost the tune and laughed until they bled from their eyes.
In the Audience that night was socialite Patron Bruce Wayne (Wayne Industries); approached for comment he suggested that this was murder and not just a simple mishap on stage. Dark Thoughts, but readers will remember that Mister Wayne’s life has been tied up in tragic deaths. Also present was Selina Kyle, who said she never missed seeing Daliah on stage, and was shaken after such a ‘vulgar, painful passing’.
It was less than 12 hours later that The Batman had reached out to the Gotham Community and asked them to please forego makeup and masks, or even close down production altogether.
Braver or More Foolish players went forth and The Joker’s second “trick” was played, and the whole cast of “The Tragedy of Isolade and Tristan” found their faces turned a death-pale white, their hair a deep, luminous green, their lips a lustrous red and their bodies a bloated, and rotting, dead.
GCPD took charge at this point and shut down every On and Off the street production, even going so far as to shut down every makeup house and fashion outlet. Soon Enough, the whole Entertainment Industry was closed, save for Stand-up joints, which were seeing a boom.
Hallowe’en came and the only Live entertainment in Gotham was someone standing with a mic and telling jokes. The city was full of Laughs.
The Joker appeared in a web video to say “You’re welcome, Laughingist City on Earth!” and he took a bow.
The Batman had him in hand by the next day, but you can’t help but wonder if the Joker just let himself be caught, since he’d had his Punchline.
Back in the late 90s and Early 2000s, before there was a Matrix Sequel or even “The Animatrix” there was just “The Matrix” and what we knew about the world of it from that first movie. It was full of the promise that “anyone” could be have super powers in the Matrix and that all it took was being “shown the way”
Well, I took that idea and ran with it. The Premise [in the RPG] was that a famous former Superman actor had received cutting edge nano-tech treatments for his spinal injury, allowing him to walk again and the tech became widely available to the point that humans commonly had enhancements to their bodies. This led to a singularity of humanity and machine where machine intelligence was born and became independent from human intelligence.
Machines had typically been slaves to humans and humanity (for the most part) wanted that to continue, but the Machines had their own goals, emotions and needs now. They were a new mode of being, purely software in any shell they could imagine. It was wonderful for the new machines, but humanity was envious of the freedom of the machine children and war broke out and “the plot of the Matrix” happened.
I don’t recall where the idea of multiple Matrixes came from, but the premise was that the “real world” in the Movie was less desolate, but that humanity was pushed mostly to “the moon” and the war between Humanity and the Machines had pushed those with the resources to do it to leave earth for the “the moon” and so Humans had to hold orbital launch stations at the poles to allow for resources to be dropped to the core.
Also, “The Matrix” that we saw in the Movie was just “That Matrix” and there were others, some with Magic, Some with Superheroes, Some with Cowboys, the premise being the GM could set the story in a Matrix with rules they could set and give the players different things to do other than “Be Neo”
I ended up scrapping it, especially after the other movies came out, I changed the title to “The Sequence” after the initial code snippet that “turned on” Machine intelligence and left it to lie
I don’t even know what happened to the manuscript at this point, it’s somewhere on a disk.
I did get it printed and bound though, since I had access to the means, along with a book of poems I wrote while working the phones for “Teh Nortons”
When CRISPR edits become legal for small size bio-doc firms to start doing, you know that during their down time, someone got the idea to try and hack those units beyond the manufacturing warranty. We’re talking professional grade gene editing and implementation tools in the hands of people who were “smart” and “motivated” but fond of very dark humour.
These gleaming white blocks of science would become the mothers of a whole new cottage industry of custom formula solutions to life’s problems. All you would needs is the formula, and you could take that on a chip or a QR code on a sticker or an image on your phone and you scan it, pay the fees and a syringe popped out with a cure for your impotence or new hair on your head, three inches on your member or for the really adventurous, all three at once.
Who knows how they tested this stuff, computer models be damned. They had to have been testing this stuff on someone, and it took decades for the world to figure out how to ID the poor bastards who survived and their kids’ kids. So you have these people making a quick buck figuring out the building blocks of life on a budget and the means to make those changes on the fly. You have entrepreneurs turning the actual working snake-oil of the ages that can be printed on cheap white paper and handed out on tickets for fractions of a penny, but at a cost of thousands to the buyers, that is until the copyright holders started to get wise and clamp down.
In the 90s and beyond in the United States, they made it legal to copyright genes, even those of the humans. So if you sequence a bit of genetic information, write it down and say “this is the sequence that defines hair colour” and stamp it and get all the forms and so on, you own the copyright on that gene sequence. So, those sequences have been bought and categorized and organized and collated, shared and updated and maintained for generations. And a great deal of that work underpinned those lovely machines.
Now the Corporations awoke from their torpor and looked at the world and said: “This is our money.”
So the machines all get locked up while the corporations who had for some decades been run by software that just endlessly moved resources around leaving people to just live. Thus the boredom.
So the Boxes had to make money for the corporations, and so there had to be profitable things to do with them that didn’t make “some kid in his teens” rich. So they started making custom people.
It happened that fast.
One day people were beautiful and lived for decades longer and the next we were neck deep in custom built kids that were nearly specialized for their jobs and pooping. It was a cruel joke that it even happened, because now we had all these kids that could only do one thing, their bodies twisted into very specialized functions. They all died, in time, having fulfilled their one task.
The people put a stop to it, after a generation of genetic crimes, the people put an end to the production of human machines. All of them had passed away and the world mourned a whole generation of children, except The Cleaners. They lived on.
Turns out that despite the best efforts of those literally greedy Corporations, a miracle happened. The Cleaners lived! They were hardy, and strong and they could take on anything, it’s why they came to be called “The Cleaners” they were able to go into any waste, any broken, poisoned place and just clean it out. They made their homes in the former Superfund sites that made up most of the Western United States and Canada. Mostly they took up around the Yellowstone crater.
The Cleaners marched out around the world, like Superheroes from an old Comic or Ancient Statues of Greek Gods come to life, if your Gods ran to thick, short and hairy.
After the sorrows and hackers and the miracle of The Cleaners, humanity could look out to the stars, and it was only right that the Cleaners should go first, because they could survive pretty much anything. They took to Venus and Mars with equal measure, colonists and then terraformers before the end of that Century. The footprint of Earth was all over the Inner planets.
The Cleaners led the way into interstellar space, lives were measured in centuries now and people could live everywhere. Pretty soon all of humanity was “a little bit Cleaner” and you know how it is Cleaners 4 Life!
I know you’re worried. You came here, killed my friend, tried to kill me and you definitely killed all those people three levels down. So I’m gonna take your eye, before anything else, I AM TAKING YOUR EYE. I am going to reach into the socket and pull it right out, and show it to you. That’s not the torture. You killed my friend, you took Fred right out of my life. So I’m gonna take your Eye.
You told me I’ve lost, that’s fine. I’ve lost before. I’ll lose again, I’m a loser. But, this Loser and You; they are gonna have a meeting of minds and at the end you’ll tell me everything you know and if you’re honest you won’t have to deal with the consequences of what you’ve done.
Fred was my friend.
You, are most decidedly not. <Snatches Eye>
My imaginary version of an interrogation scene from The Expanse, it incensed me.
Notorious Homophobes and Christian Values expounders Chick-fil-A were an unknown quantity to me when I first visited Virginia in 1999. I had never seen their “Eet mor Chikin” signs nor even ventured inside one of them; and I may never ever if things continue on path. I’ll remember Virginia for it’s temperate November, it’s hard to find liquor store and sinking me back into the morass of comics that I had abandoned not 2 years earlier.
