Chapter Eight - The End of the World
Anskin Voss heard something in the far distance. He lost focus on the book he was reading, concentrating on the already fading sound without understanding why. Where had it come from? Not the subway car he was in, and not the cars ahead or behind his own. Indeed, the rattle and crack of the train had been louder than the... the words. Yes, muted, half-heard, foreign-sounding words. A barbed and vicious whisper that had cut right through everything.
Other passengers were looking around and at one another. They had heard it too, so Voss' little genetic time bomb hadn't gone off just yet.
Must have been something in the tunnels, he reasoned, looking past his reflection to the shifting black behind. Soviet tunnels. Some old intercom system near the tracks.
He returned to his book and, insulated in layers of cement and steel and traveling at irregular speed and along a curving directional vector, Voss' world continued on as it had for his entire life, for a few moments longer.
The train stopped and he was pushing into the yielding press of fellow commuters crowding the train platform. Someone was shouting ahead, in what sounded like English. The crowd around him slowed, and then stopped.
This was not an uncommon occurrence on the platform, which was poorly designed and allowed a few pushy street performers to effectively channel work-weary crowds so as to best beg for money. Voss simply returned to his book.
The crowd milled, murmured.
Somewhere up ahead, a janitor was being sloppy with a mop, and some unseen, distant part of the crowd reacted with shouts. Outrage.
Voss' eyes lost focus again, and something inside him shifted. Felt like he was being pulled toward the ceiling, but ever so slightly, as though in a descending elevator, the pressure against the top of his toes fractionally greater as they rose in his shoes.
The janitor up ahead, or maybe a few of them, must have been cleaning up puke or something. Or maybe the street performers were doing something weird. Whatever it was, the crowd ahead was taking it badly.
"Just give me a minute, shit."
Voss' head snapped around so quickly his neck popped. An old bearded man stared back at him, startled. Voss turner in place, looking for some frustrated, suffering young woman.
"Just give me a god damn minute."
Tears sprang from Voss' eyes, and his hands went up to his face. The book, a gift from a dear friend, tumbled to the ground, forgotten.
What was this? He hadn't thought of mom in months. A year.
The unseen janitors were working as quick as they could, sopping slaps all along the platform's length. The crowd was moving up along the platform. The shouting continued, was growing. Brief cries of wordless exaltation, and maybe the occasional name. Voss went along with the crowd, running fingers through his hair, as though to bring order to the spiraling thoughts within.
There was light ahead, moving through the crowd. A glaring mass of burning sodium white. Above that, a harsh pink filtered in beyond a turn in the platform, where the station exit would be.
And then mom was there, on the platform before him, sitting on that torn and stained couch, one hand carefully resting against her scalp, just above the hairline, just short of where a crescent of pink-purple brain matter had emerged from her skull at the edge of the divot in her forehead. Somewhere behind Voss, further down the platform, her boyfriend, the bastard Allon, would be laying on his side in a spreading pool of piss.
"I just need a second, and I'll be fine-ded," mom said, finger straying to touch the tissue that had spurted from her head. She spasmed at the contact.
More wet impacts. Not a mop hitting the ground. There were no janitors.
Voss turned away from mom, not wanting to see the final collapse. He moved away from the scene. More white figures, crowding the platform. There was hardly anyone left. Down the platform a man leaned against a pillar, trembling, as a white figure, two points of ruby light set in the top of its form, reached for him, and then he was gone in a burst of liquid that splattered against Voss's face. It was warm, and stank like blood. The man's soaked clothes collapsed onto the floor with a familiar sound. The liquid was yellow against the minimalist tilework, far too much to just be from the man. There had been hundreds of people on the platform, and they all spilled over Voss's shoes like floodwater, briefly cresting his ankles before leveling down, draining onto the tracks.
The train. It was still in the station. Its doors yawning open. There were white shapes in there, but not as many. Voss headed for it, and tripped.
He caught himself, tried to continue forward, but found one leg was immobile. A hand had emerged from the tilework of the platform to grab it. He tried to pull free, but the hand was strong. He kicked at the hand, but that did nothing. The hand squeezed and mom was there again and again and again sitting on the couch, staring up at him, the light in her eyes going out over and over and always.
The thing the hand was attached to emerged from the tiled floor like a playful swimmer, and from the first moment he saw messy brown hair, Voss knew who it was. Another hand emerged from the floor to grab his knee, and then mom was pulling herself up, and she wasn't hurt anymore. Her head was fine, was perfect, her face clear of scrapes or lesions, and her eyes were the size of silver dollars and filled with a joy he had rarely seen.
"Mommy?" Voss asked, sealing his fate.
The psychopomp embraced him, and Anskin Voss gladly let go.
The skies and ground and the very air itself took on a crimson hue. Psychopomps squirmed through surfaces and buildings, maggots emerging from the world corpse, and screams of horror and delight echoed in the places where mankind gathered, punctuated by the distinct sound of person-shaped volumes of liquid collapsing around empty clothes.
Within ten minutes, most of Mankind was gone. All that remained were those that had no loved ones, not even in memory, and even these twisted souls were manually dismantled, handful by handful, by the countless unattenuated psychopomps that carpeted the planet.
The entirety of the Earth was depopulated in under twelve minutes.
Crosses lambent with poison light rose into the sky above all the emptied places, each denoting a vertical corridor along which billions of wriggling, lunar-bright figures could stream clear of gravity and into the sky.
In high orbit, the crew of the International Space Station struggled to maintain sanity as madness reached in. The Earth had been replaced by a pyroclastic hellscape, a silent abyss that gave off only the idiot chatter of automated systems.
The crew, eight men and three women, did their best to maintain mental balance. They attempted to turn inward, to focus on the available data in order to quantify the calamity and it effects. It was a snapshot of rigid control, a defiant prayer to order in the face of sudden ruin. But within moments of this brave undertaking, the ISS and its crew found itself being carried out of orbit by a collection of writhing white figures flowing like a river across the sky below them. The ISS entered this impossible current and was pushed along with it, surrounded on all sides by a press of pale humanoids that shone with blinding cold light only interrupted by twin Betelgeuse twinkles where human beings would have eyes.
The ISS was dragged along, and something horrible, incomprehensible, emerged from beneath the Earth's horizon. Long and oddly defined and bright like the ruby-eyed shapes pressing in around the space station.
These emerging titanic shapes lacked angular design, and the uniformity of color and lack of apparent component parts suggested something that no one still living was prepared to confront.
And even as the crew struggled to interpret those planet-scale shapes, the burning world below was changing. Lines of white were creeping into being, expanding in width and length, seeking out one another. For a time, it appeared like fat marbling meat, but even those glimpses of surface were soon gone, encased in a film of white.
And above that mycelial layer, more and more of the vast shapes came into view, individual parts of a whole array, reaching out in delicate pearlescent ribbons, the largest of which had to be at least a hundred miles across at its narrowest span, and thousands of miles long.
Fahri Kalheed saw how the shapes clustered and flexed and remembered going to a rattlesnake hunt with her father, remembered how the scaly serpents with death's own gaze had twisted around each other in their dens. She remembered how the snakes had been captured and lowered, one after another, into a plexiglass coffin, where they would hiss and coil around the body of a foolish volunteer. She remembered how the hunters had put in too many snakes. She remembered the whine of organic rattles and the coughing sound of spitting, striking snakes. She remembered the bruised body that had been pulled from the coffin, the one her sweating father had so wanted her to see to confirm that the volunteer was not a corpse. She remembered his body being dark red, and swollen. She remembered knowing that the man was dead.
The shapes made sense. Some nest of cosmic serpents weaving down from the stars and biting into an unsuspecting world. Some kind of mega-scale astraofauna, pumping molten death into the planet.
The other crew members, those that still had something which hung together in the rough shape of a sapient mind, anyway, all saw something different. A vast solar array, or possibly a sail. The sketched shape of wings. A sharp six fingered hand poised to swat them from the sky. A fan of planetary heart blood that had somehow erupted from a ruptured core and flash froze in orbit.
It was a Rorschach test for the Apocalypse.
But then the titanic shapes grew closer and closer as the horizon fell away, and, presently. The thing they were attached to emerged, and the scale of the Titan, the single thing to which all parts were connected, was at last revealed.
Fahri saw the blinding pillar of light her serpents extended from, and her reality shifted. No longer snakes, they were in fact the articulated legs of a crab.
Dennis Fettle saw the massive shape, and a hundred million years of hard coded image recognition picked out the projection just visible on the far side, the twin curves set where the the pillar split in two and descended into the white blank where the Earth had been. He saw the Titan and wanted to fuck it.
Kendal Tyler saw the Titan clearest, for there was no sanity left in him to try and mediate the truth for his own protection. He saw a pale, winged human of inconceivably titanic aspect, presiding over a near-complete and sudden extinction. Without much fuss, he left the observation port he had been glued to for the last two hours, located the nearest airlock, and opened it.
Later, when the river of psychopomps bent upward to enter a spiraling vector that would end at the Black Moon, the inertia of the ISS at last punched it free, and set it skipping across the atmosphere like a stone on a lake, until at last it entered the final stages of orbital decay, a process that shattered the frozen chunks of meat that were all the ISS now had as a crew.
The ragged cinders of mind and soul the crew had left to give were greedily pulled from the flaming debris long before it hit anything solid.
By this point unattenuated psychopomps had spawned in the tens of quadrillions, their mass coating the surface in a layer more than a mile deep. Such things were possible with the will of a god, and the horror of infinity.
The last scrap of human life to leave Earth was a sequence of memories from an astronaut named Bet Jeckyl, just a few wisps of related synaptic activity — namely, the smell of pancakes from when she was six years old.
There had been more to Bet, nearly four decades of thoughts and experience. Once, she had known that the pancakes had been cooked by her daddy, in lard. They called these 'buttercakes', for no particular reason.
One morning long ago she had woken up not expecting the smell and it had been there, because daddy had come home from his trip early. It was a happy moment, even better than Christmas because she hadn't been expecting it.
That had been before the hospitals, and the stink of sickness had settled into her life. Before daddy had shrunk and his hair and beard had fallen out, and he hadn't been able to smile as much or make (much less eat) buttercakes. Before the end of her world and the hazy aftermath, before meeting Ben and screwing that up.
But all those other parts of Bet Jeckyl were gone, reduced to cinders, to ash, the very information carried in her mind having lost cohesion and attachment, fading from paraphysical existence in the tumult of Mankind's becoming.
Only one psychopomp managed to gather together a collection of remains coherent enough to form that limited memory, that smell of pancakes. She was the last of her kind to attenuate, the last to leave the atmosphere.
Shinji Ikari saw all this, outside and inside and all around, because he was with Ayanami. And it was into that bleakness that he asked the question.
The stupid question.
The one he had so needed Ayanami to answer.
"Is it okay for me to be here?"
Pancakes.
A bald man sitting in a hospital bed, squinting through tears, trying to find the words to tell his 9 year old daughter that he wouldn't be around much long.
The world ended, in so many ways.
Rattlesnakes in the box, all over him, shudder and hiss, angry eyes, but no bite so:
"Is it okay for me to be here?"
Cold, and sharp pain.
Light, faint. Light, scattered.
A faint constellation in an otherwise perfect void.
Cold. He remembered cold, yes.
Shinji gasped. LCL flooded up his throat and came spewing free. He leaned against a surface, smooth to one hand and rough to the other. He heaved again, and when he opened his eyes the constellation was close.
Ayanami was gone. The Sea Under the Sea was gone.
It hadn't been okay, for him to be there.
He pulled himself up. Pain in his knees, fresh pain to his bare feet as they found sharp edges and points all along the ground. He pictured the cockpit of Unit One, trying to snap out of it, not sure what dream he was trying to wake from. But no, this was real. True pain. Personal pain. He grazed the floor with one foot, probing for a safe surface. Eventually he found one.
Two days later he would be back. Would play a flashlight across the space where he had come to. He would see the impact spray of a shattered windshield where he had been kneeling, and the empty sets of clothes inside the car the windshield had belonged to. He would crouch on the broken glass in his scavenged shoes and stare at a whorl of cement on the tunnel wall, where a tile had been knocked free, by time or the car's bumper grinding against the wall further down, who knew?
He would turn off the flashlight and wait for his eyes to adjust. Wait for the constellation to reappear, catching some faint, attenuated starlight.
And it would never appear again.
But right now he had a single, solitary safe place to step on. He leaned back, probing with his other foot. In an hour, he'd be able to make out the twilight morning sky up ahead, past the tunnel mouth. In two hours he would be free of the tunnel, up the road, reading a sign he had just overtaken, meant to be read by vehicles driving into the tunnel.
"You are Leaving the Village of Akari, Drive Safe!"
In six hours he would be standing in the center of a quiet village, feeling the scream build. In twelve hours he'd be just about done breaking windows. A day later he'd have found clothes that fit and a cache of dried food in the shelter under the tiny Civics Center. Two days later he'd return to the tunnel, to find a simple swirl of cement.
After that, he'd go to the other end of the tunnel, and onto the coastal road. He would find a set of footprints, his own, leading up from the beach, where they vanished into the red surf.
Ayanami's broken face would leer at him from the horizon.
And he knew he was exactly where he was supposed to be. That he was where it was okay for him to be.
Black clouds were crowding the sky by the time he was done at the beach. He entered the tunnel just as it started to pour. He stayed at the tunnel mouth for a time, watching Ayanami fade away in the intensifying rain.