Chapter 8: This is the End
From /Signified ---- Book Two of 2084 Quartet
PLEASE NOTE: The following material is intended for mature readers only.
A Note on Language
It is inevitable, in a work of speculative fiction, that futuristic technologies, technical terms, and even everyday slang appear in the course of the narrative. For the convenience of the reader, the first time each of these neologisms appears in the story, it will be marked in boldface and hyperlinked to the Glossary of Terms and Slang, where you will be able to find a definition. Additionally, on occasion a non-English language will be used in the dialogue among characters. While no direct translations have been provided, never fear. The reader will be able, quite readily, to discern the meaning of these utterances within the context of the story.
Quick Plot Recap
In Chapter 7, inside the Waco Great Pyramid, much shit hits the fan. In the Eye of the Great Pyramid, both the TexArc Board of Directors and Oak Wat, along with his Wrangle Ministers, meet their gruesome deaths. Carrying out Sinalco’s subterfuge, Enron is the author of this mayhem—and he dies heroically for the Wobbly cause. Like a cockroach, Bleached Wheat survives the attack. The TexArc ceo then goes to torture and execute his prize prisoner: Mall. As he does, we discover that, like Sinalco, Bleached Wheat is no longer human. In the end, Mall undergoes a horrendous public execution, confident that her sacrifice will help preserve the social ideal of alterity and save the commonwealth of EVe. In fact, Mall never understands that, from the beginning, she’s been a pawn in the cross-Atlantic showdown of political cunning and high-stakes espionage.
Chapter 8
This is the End
Announced by that amusing, hermetic, farting sound, Bleached Wheat steps, smiling to himself, from between the sliding doors of the double airlock. He’s always relieved to disembark a shuttle—cramped and vile things. Their stale air gives him headaches. (Or at least he keeps pretending to his subceos that it does.) As he’d ordered, the Executive Platform is deserted, as he likes it for this kind of thing. On the wall to his right is the big white star inside a thin red circle against the deep blue background. In fact, the whole interior of the ExecPlat is deep blue—walls, deck, ceiling. People like color, he muses, dynamic color. It helps them enjoy their workspace. He places a kiss on the fingertips of his right hand and plants it with a brisk slap in the center of the star. Then, with anticipation in his step, he makes his way across the forty meters of polished blue floor to the curved bank of observation windows.
“Funk Salsa,” he speaks aloud as he goes.
From everywhere, an energizing, faintly militaristic tune begins to play. Just right, he thinks. Gyrating. With one hand, he sweeps the slightly wavier, somewhat sandy curls off his forehead. With his other, he brings his gold watchwrist up to eye level. Time to catch Vieworld. Another smile plumps his somewhat tawny lips. As the talkheads on that program constantly blurt out: “Time To Know!” Yes, indeed. People need to know the Know. But how sweet it is to be the Know.
He stops a few meters short of the windows to concentrate on the little flatscreen of his watch. Nothing newsbig running at the moment—as he’d ordered—just the drone. EVe soldiers bayonetting babies. EVe rape squads at their work. The usual brainslow fare. Satisfied, he buries his hands in his pockets and slowly takes the last few steps toward the windows. The panes extend floor-to-ceiling, thick and convex, all but invisible. He places his toes right at their edge before allowing his eyes to focus on what’s outside. When he does, the base of his scrotum tingles deliciously. (A stimulus-response he’s selected always to preserve.) Far, far below is Big Blue—his Earth. His contented exhalation, escaping out his somewhat shorter, somewhat broader nose, fogs the nanoglass in front of him. There’s never enough of the selfoblige. But there is one last piece of biz to get to.
He swivels his head toward the northeast and narrows his eyes. He’s hoping to be able to see the flash. He needs no series of contrived personal code words now. There are no doubtoms left in TexArc. Especially not with the White Man’s Plague raging. (EVe treachery in fact seems to know no bounds.) Bleached Wheat speaks openly and directly to ArcSpace EastAtlantic Sector Command.
“Both at once. Now.”
“Roger that, sir.”
**********
From their low-earth orbit, HEL constellations precision-target and obliterate all EVe aircraft flying inside a two-hundred-klick radius of the target cities. GLASS launches as well thousands of deeks—high-atmosphere decoys overloading the EVe early-warning system. Simultaneously, two ArcSpace TAVs, stealth and supersonic, bring down the payloads. When they reach firepoint, each releases a pair of B61-11 earth penetrators—Old Reliable. EVeShield interceptor missiles manages to take out one of each pairing. But a fifty-percent killrate doesn’t get this job done. Not by half. One penetrator dives vertical through the dome of the Radcliffe Camera. It pierces ten meters underground. It detonates. After a brilliant flash, the dreaming spires of Oxford become a broad base surge with a narrow chimney-column cloud rising over its epicenter. At about the same moment, another tacnuke crashes through the roof of Saint Nicholas Cathedral, traveling chancel-to-narthex. It burrows into the slope of the Old City. Its outward explosion is angled and momentarily churned by the hem of the deep river bend and sheer cliff faces. In a flash, everything old-world, everything obsessively tended in Fribourg, quick-fries and is gone. Sturdy wooden bridge. Foot-worn cobblestone. Red-tile roof. Hospitable Gasthaus. Public fountain in a small square. The smell of baking bread.
**********
In geosynch orbit 36,000km above the surface of the earth, Bleached Wheat feels through his heels the quick jolt of the Elevator auto-detaching into safe-sections. He looks down between his feet to see the four or five massive top modules ponderously starting to wheel and lift independently into higher safe-orbit. His shuttle, ArcSpace One, also is drifting away, forced to break its dock during this emergency protocol. The baritone gut-rumbling rhythmic pulse of the breach alarm replaces his music as well. Some kind of serious shit has hit the fan.
<Sir! Sir!>
It’s Java on comm from the shuttle. Insanely anxious and Johnny-on-the-spot. Good boy.
<What the fuck happened? Who screwed what pooch?>
<Well, sir...it’s...>
But the young subceo freezes, not yet used to this magnitude of responsibility.
<Jesus, cup your balls if you have to, son, but just fucking say it. What the fuck’s going on?>
<EVe deepsloop, sir. It’s...it’s probably been lying up for...well...weeks on the ocean floor...>
<And?>
<And...well, sir...it seems that ArcSea lost track of it—>
<Seems that?>
There’s a harried pause.
<Sorry, sir. ArcSea lost track of it, sir. Weeks ago. And now they’re telling me that—>
<You’re just finding out about this now?>
Several moments of dead-comm panic.
<Well, sir...yes, sir...sorry, sir...but I...>
Reporting your first piece of really bad newsbig is a harrowing rite of passage for a newbie subceo. Bleached Wheat remembers vividly his own first big fuckup, back when corp was more or less in the biz of suppressing domestic major urban riots. His knees literally shook when he had to tell his bossman, Ed Fe, that DetroitToledo just couldn’t be brought to heel with finesse alone. That it was going to take the full-cap outlay of yet another balls-out urbpass. He nearly dropped a load in his pants when he had to say the actual words. He wants to make sure that Java benefits from the same managerial terror.
<Which deepsloop is it, son? Let’s just fucking start there.>
<Fifth of May, sir. Their newest and most evasive according to our latest infoflow. That’s probably why we were...well...never able to reacquire its signature.>
<There are no probablies in poochscrews, Java.>
<Yes, sir.>
<And what did you and ArcSea let the Fifth of May do to us?>
<Well, sir...it launched a counterattack, sir. Just moments after we struck EVe.>
<What kind of counterattack? Just what the fuck got launched at us?>
<Nuketip torpedoes, sir. An entire bank of them. Their new sonar deadzones. Real bitches to detect coming in...sir.>
<That’s it? No aerial warheads? Nothing sea-to-land aimed at our mainland?>
<No, sir. Luckily not. No hostile missiles are reported in the air at this time, sir.>
<Shit. Those wimps.>
<Sir?>
<Who is answering questions here, Java?>
<Sorry, sir. I am, sir.>
<What got hit by these torpedoes? I hope not one of our big, expensive aircraft carriers.>
<Well...no, sir. It was...well...something else, sir...>
<Like fucking what?>
<Well, sir...somehow one of the torpedoes...managed to get through...>
To indicate the final straw, Bleached Wheat switches their conversation onto watchwrist vid. When Java’s face appears, he looks satisfyingly ready to shit a brick. Bleached Wheat pretends to take a wild guess.
<Don’t tell me it hit the fucking sea platform, Java!>
It takes a moment, but Java looks squarely into the vidscreen. He firms his jaw. He speaks with conviction.
<Yes, sir. I’m afraid it did, sir. My apologies, sir. This is entirely my poochscrew.>
Ah, but abused children are so cute to have around.
<Really now? That’s a lot of poochscrew to take on all by yourself, son. Are you sure you don’t want to share the blame a little bit? Are you aware of the scale of this assfuck? Of how many zillions of DollArcs it takes to build a floating base platform for a Space Elevator? We haven’t even finished construction on our Pacific sea platform yet. What the fuck makes you think you can survive a poochscrew this Dmega?>
Bleached Wheat gives Java a good dose of the most famous eyes in TexArc. The most infamous eyes around the globe. Pure fox. All aggression. Zero glassy. Eyes that reach down your throat. Eyes the color of black steel. Java doesn’t flinch.
<No guts, no glory, sir. No pain, no gain. Like you, sir, I’m a fucking risktaker. This is all my poochscrew, sir.>
Oh my God. Bleached Wheat might just be in love.
This changeover was inevitable. Honestly, overdue. The PC is entirely mongrel at this point. The deep southern bend of the BHC has been majority mex and afro for decades. Only the central wheatlands and the northern IMS remain dominant blood-in-the-face. And even those regions are losing their old racial grounding. For a long time now White Might has been a meaningless neotrumper survival. Where once he strove to be its ne plus ultra, Bleached Wheat himself hardly gives a shit about it anymore. Java is twice as smart and on-the-ball than Wells or Fargo ever were. Pace seems to be dealing just fine with his sudden promotion to boss of Security. And the two other darkies they had to bring in to run Market Enterprise and Culture are working out so far, too. One guy is oriental—Wang or Bong or whatever—and the other guy some combination of exotica that Bleached Wheat can’t even keep straight. Just not whiteboy. Soon, there won’t even be any of those left in corp. That’s how bad this virus is kicking their ass. Nice trick. Good move. How did those fucking eurolosers pull it off? Ah, well. Roll with the punches. A smattering of blowback is entertaining. It will take him a while to re-man considerable segments of his military. Particularly ArcGround. That’s why Bleached Wheat launched his attack right away. Get things rolling before personnel attrition took too big of a hit.
<Tell me, Java. How many sailors did we lose?>
<About five thousand, sir.>
<And how will that play on Vieworld?>
No hesitation. <Damn doublechoice, sir.>
Bleached Wheat doesn’t suppress his smile. He imagines, in this next brave new world of his, he’ll keep shading bronzer and bronzer. Heading, eventually, for Burnt Wheat. Then finally Burnt Umber. And that’s the big takeaway for this old dog learning new tricks. Euros may have invented it, but anyone can be trained up in the need—the need for capitalgreed. Anyone. Melanin count has nothing to do with climbing the fucking ladder.
<All right. Re-dock my shuttle. Looks like we’ve got a full-blown justwar on our hands. Let’s get down to work.>
<Yes, sir! Backward and Upward, sir!>
Bleached Wheat cuts the vid and puts an end to the claxon alarm. The agreeable Funk Salsa comes back up. He folds his hands behind his back. He stands at ease waiting for his shuttle, gazing calmly out the observation windows. The ExecPlat module free spins in space, safe and serene. Gradually, it rotates into a position where he’s looking straight down—where the colossal white shaft of the Elevator column used to be. Far below, he can make out some of its lower sections, overtaken by gravity, toppling into the giant white mushroom cloud spreading out over the Atlantic. Like a nuclear hurricane. World War 4—or is it 5?—has begun at last. Bleached Wheat shifts the focus of his eyes to his own face smiling back at him—distorted, funhouse-mirror-like—in the thick convex nanoglass only a few centimeters in front of this nose. This is going better than he ever could have hoped.
