Rage Reigns Down
A new book by Steven E Sannella
Chapter 3: Michael
वर्तमान हमारे अतीत के कर्मों से निर्धारित होता है, और भविष्य वर्तमान से
The present is determined by our past actions, and the future by the present.
- Swami Vivekananda
“We are two lost souls searching for the light.”
“Alert! Alert! This is not a drill! Michael, report to the control center, alert!!!”
“Apsis, I already told you I’m on my way,” Michael pressed.
“And I already told you this is not a drill,” Apsis pushed back.
All of their drills began that way.
Michael’s lethargy was, according to him, at least partially justified by the true lack of emergencies for over twenty years now. What is there to be ready for when every day begins and ends the same? But truth be told, something felt different this time. Michael wasn’t sure why. Usually there was chatter when a surprise drill was planned. But this alert was preceded by silence. This alert also had a dreaded sense of urgency about it.
Michael gathered himself and, not thinking clearly, looked outside his window to see what time of day or night it was. It was a curious thing to do since there was no way to discern day from night inside the habitable zone. Another “unnecessary thought pattern” Apsis Intelligenx would often remind him.
Michael was well built in a rough and tumble sort of way. He believed himself to be in his late thirties, perhaps early forties, but he had conveniently forgotten exactly how old he was. He had dark brown hair, deep blue eyes, and was altogether too wrapped up inside his own head for his own good. He was generally too consumed with trying to work through a twenty-year malaise to be bothered by obstacles such as the upper bunk of his bed, walls that seemed to appear from out of nowhere, or doors with minds of their own.
Michael was often salty and perpetually bruised as a result.
The sun was blocked out by a perpetual drab grey haze, perhaps the most obvious reminder of The War. The War had left its mark on every corner of society. The price of their victory was extreme. Most of the world was a radioactive wasteland filled with the shattered dreams of the dying and the minimal expectations of the living. Fires still burned nonstop since The War had ended, a reminder of the rage that consumed all.
Once global annihilation seemed the likeliest outcome, Apsis Intelligenx was activated to become the Guardian of Humanity. It represented the zenith of human scientific and engineering prowess. Apsis Intelligenx was a fully realized hybrid intelligence that had independent decision-making capabilities. It was able to speak directly to people through embedded microchips latched onto peoples’ brainstems, through loudspeakers sprinkled throughout the habitable zone, or through virtually any piece of technology. Apsis Intelligenx, or Apsis as it was generally called, controlled most of the technological capabilities inside the zone. This included the mechanisms by which Apsis decontaminated the world of the toxins bequeathed to it by humanity’s final victory. As Apsis slowly reclaimed the ground, sea, and sky around the zone, the zone itself grew in size. This was a painfully slow process, and the zone rarely grew by more than a foot or two in diameter per year under optimal circumstances. Were it not for Apsis’s efforts, however, humanity itself would have passed into shadow a long time ago.
Apsis used an extraordinary amount of power and resources, not only to keep itself active, but also to manage all of the technology under its charge. As such, Apsis had little patience to argue with people over trivial minutiae, of which it found there was plenty of. Managing the people it was built to protect seemed disproportionately burdensome to it. Things like the optimum illumination setting inside the zone and how many hours per day would be devoted to day versus night seemed like unnecessary thought patterns to Apsis. These distractions drew Apsis’s attention away from more critical issues like managing resource scarcity and ensuring optimum human growth rates. In order to regulate equity, baseline expectations, and minimize energy expenditure, Apsis decided it would be best to keep the ambient light inside the habitable zone a constant shade of grey, regardless of whether it was “day” or “night.” This illumination setting mirrored the same unnatural illumination levels as humanity’s greyed-out sun. If things were always the same, what would there be to argue about?
“There is comfort in consistency,” Apsis was fond of saying.
Of course, once Apsis pulled the day versus night argument off the table, people just argued about the greyness itself. A long time ago, Apsis had even given people back the means to tell time and all they did was complain about how many hours they had to spend working. Apsis had come to believe there may be nothing it could do to quiet peoples’ squabbling.
One of Michael’s few personal treasures from before The War was a timekeeping relic. It had stopped working long ago but he looked at it often. The relic was cracked in several places, with rusted out mechanical gears. Stories had been passed down since the end of The War about how time was measured, and how distinct day and night were from each other. As a kid, Michael used to run around showing off his dusty cracked timekeeping relic, yelling “its dawn, its dusk, its nighttime,” etc. to anyone who humored him enough to listen. People got tired of it. Michael had tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Apsis to repair it for him many times. He argued he could maximize his efficiency with a timekeeping device instead of being late all the time, but “resource scarcity” and
“I keep time for you” were the customary replies Michael received upon the denial of his requests.
“Alert! Alert! This is not a drill! Michael, report to the control center, alert!!!”
At this moment, Michael reminisced on those days of yore. He glanced back and forth between his relic and the bleak imagery outside his window.
“It must be dawn,” he quickly surmised.
Of course, Michael had never seen the sun before, but he pretended he knew what it looked like. He was certain it didn’t look like the drab greyness he was staring at outside his window.
“Alert! Alert! This is not a drill! Michael, report to the control center, alert!!!”
“Now’s not the time to daze, Michael,” he reminded himself.
Michael grabbed his clothes and nearly stumbled over himself, trying to dress and run at the same time. He was able to put on his shirt easy enough, but he was having a terrible time trying to slide his feet into his shoes on the go.
“Michael, you’re going to trip and fall. Why don’t you stop running for a moment and use your hands to put your shoes on?” Apsis recommended.
“Because, Apsis,” reminded Michael, “my hands are too busy trying to pull up my pants at the moment.”
“Constantly late and seldom dressed appropriately,” Dai Lu had documented in his last several performance evaluations.
“I get the job done, Apsis,” Michael said as he tripped and fell, “ouch, fuck! In fact, I’m quite good at it, so why does she care that my clothes are a bit disheveled?”
“There is comfort in correction,” Apsis reminded him.
“I’m really sick of hearing that phrase, Apsis.”
“I’m sick of repeating it, Michael.”
Michael definitely felt more clumsy than usual today. His forehead was still smarting from smacking it against the bunk bed. But today, he wasn’t going to enter the Apsis Intelligenx’s Control Center until he was fully dressed. If this was a real emergency, he was going to be on point. Ironically, if it was a real emergency, he probably wouldn’t be harassed for any wardrobe malfunctions. As Michael picked himself up off the ground and ran forward, he started to wonder if he was indeed using the correct approach in the donning of his clothes.
“Maybe I’d be less late if I dressed fully before leaving my room instead of trying to dress on the go. What do you think, Apsis?”
“Alert! Alert! This is not a drill! Michael, report to the control center, alert!!!”
Michael’s mind was always churning with questions of this sort, which allowed him to be distracted enough to contemplate everything from the science behind his grooming habits to the nature of the universe. It was both a blessing and a curse.
“Apsis, do you think…,”
“MICHAEL, GET TO THE FUCKING CONTROL CENTER!’
“Ok Apsis, I’m almost there, no need to yell.”
“…,” Apsis replied.
As Michael finally made his not quite so grand appearance to the control center, Jack was sitting there waiting for him, casting his customary derisive gaze. Jack was one of those maddeningly precise people who took great pride in limiting his unnecessary thought patterns to ensure maximum operational efficiency. He was young, chiseled, symmetrical, blond hair, green eyes and physically stunning. However, he ruined it every time he opened his mouth, Michael believed. Jack had the personality of those walls Michael seemed so unintentionally fond of bumping into. He also would not understand, nor approve of, any of Michael’s inefficiencies such as gazing into the grey beyond in an attempt to divine whether it was day or night, especially when the alarm was sounding off. Quite frankly, Jack didn’t really approve of anything that didn’t center around Jack. Michael had resisted Apsis Intelligenx’s last several attempts to pair him with Jack, as part of its comfort in companionship campaign. Michael deemed such a match unfeasible. Michael thought Jack was physically gorgeous, but also believed Jack would be better off partnering with a mirror. As Apsis was actually not a flesh and blood entity itself, the criteria it used to match people did not always make sense to the people being matched. Apsis did believe that people generally needed to be matched together as it complied with several basic human instincts. But since Apsis didn’t entirely trust humanity’s judgement on romantic matters, it assigned or reassigned romantic partners based on its own views of what would be best for society as a whole. Although it did prefer not to force companionships as it chose not to do in Michael’s case, it found itself having to do so quite often with other people.
Michael suddenly snapped back to reality. He forgot he was standing before Jack. As he finally gathered himself and dwelled on what it was he wanted to say next, Jack bludgeoned him with a sitrep,
“Apsis reports there has been an attack on a trawler ship operating off the coast.”
“In the habitable zone?” Michael asked.
“Uncertain if the attack occurred outside or inside the zone. However, none of the crew’s chips are transmitting.”
“When did they stop transmitting?”
“I’m not sure,” Apsis conceded, “They were in a heavily irradiated area near the edge of the zone. As you know, I have difficulty monitoring people that far out due to the extreme radiation levels. The crew were late reporting in, and I noticed the ship was adrift. It was well off its intended course. I pinged the ship’s comms and when I heard nothing, I pinged their internal chips. None were active."
“The ship has run aground,” Jack continued, “drone swarms have been activated and are arriving as we speak. Projecting imagery now.”
Apsis consolidated the live feeds of hundreds of drones, determined for Michael and Jack what was likely to be the most relevant for them and displayed these feeds on three rather large display screens. There was an RGB display, a LiDAR display and an Infrared display. The RGB and LiDAR composite displays showed essentially the same thing, a large solid metal crate on the deck of the salvage ship. One panel, or door of the metal crate was open. Several sailors were savagely strewn about the deck; literally ripped to pieces in a horrifying blood-spattered scene reminiscent of the type of stories Apsis, parents, and grandparents took great delight in telling to children at night to rob them of their sleep.
But what was going on with the infrared display?
“How long have these people been dead? Shouldn’t their bodies be giving off a higher heat signature? I can hardly see them on the infrared,” Michael stated.
Before Apsis or Jack could answer, they saw movement on the deck. A woman ran up onto the deck from the crew quarters below. She was a glowing, radiant woman with a bronzed brown skin tone and long hair that literally shimmered as if it was made of solid gold. She moved with more elegance and grace than grace itself. Moving faster than any hybrid constabulary ever could, she leapt from the deck of the ship and took off running. She was amazing. She radiated all of life’s passion and all of life’s terrifying tempest. She reminded Michael of those stories people handed down from before The War about how the morning sun looked at dawn. Not only was she inspiration personified, she had a familiar quality about her.
Apsis sent most of the drones after her. But it was a futile gesture. Whoever she was and wherever she came from, she was gone in a flash.
“Did you see that?” Michael stammered, “did we get a clear recording?”
“RGB and LiDAR caught glimpses, but she is not registering on infrared at all…”
Jack trailed off in a most uncharacteristic way. He was looking at his operator screen which was displaying Apsis Intelligenx’s probabilities analysis. He was suddenly very still. Michael asked him what the readout said, but Jack’s shock overwhelmed him. He just sat there in silence. Jack was never silent. Perhaps this day wasn’t going to be all bad after all, Michael said to himself before shouting,
“APSIS, REPORT!”
The sirens stopped. The flashing red and white lights shut off and restored the customary drab greyness. But that silence… It was as if the incredibly vast array of machines and power systems that gave Apsis Intelligenx its life and the entire habitable zone its power stopped humming. It was as if Apsis Intelligenx itself was nervous.
“The most likely conclusion,” Apsis began solemnly, “is that she is a vampire.”