Ex Lacrima Remnant

Track #41 – In a Blaze of Glory

Thirty minutes after the Turn of the Millennium, the Barricade was no more. At first, it was just a small hole in one of the concrete blocks. Then cracks appeared everywhere, spreading like a cobweb. In less than a minute, the last bastion of defense between the festival area and the rest of New Babylon ceased to exist. The plaza behind it, where the market was held, didn’t last two minutes longer. It too was deleted from existence.

Eaten into nothingness.

One hour after the Turn of the Millennium, Aralu saw the real sky for the first time since its construction. For the last time since its construction. The sky panels were chewed, assimilated, disassembled by the wave of deletion, leaving nothing in its wake. The buildings. The Eye. The metro station. The walls with the graffiti. The tunnels. The illegal spaceport. Everything assaulted, chipped at, bitten, devoured by the nanoswarm. Everyone who didn’t evacuate yet. Everyone that wasn’t aware of the events. The clotheslines. The garages. Caro’s workshop. Dobrio’s taxi. Cowmower. They disappeared from Lagash, leaving nothing behind.

As if man never was.

As if the planet never knew a civilization.

The graveyard in the tunnels, the collective pseudorhizome found peace too.

Eaten by the only organism capable of stopping its regeneration.

Assimilated. Turned into a soup of atoms.

In the sixty minutes that the swarm required to cover a radius of around four kilometers, Aralu was erased from the maps, leaving an empty ashen wasteland behind, devoid of life, under the faint light of the moon.

Three hours after the Turn of the Millennium, the swarm approached the central precinct of the Peacekeeper Corps. A precinct that was already empty, all personnel evacuated. All except one man, standing in the greenhouse, dragging heavy equipment on the floor, while wearing flip flops and sporting a questionable white shirt with cartoon erotica plastered all over it. That man was sweating profusely, setting up yet another batch of sensors, his wide grin never leaving his face even if his arms hurt like hell.

“Lagash fuck me, this is not hot at all. Assistant! Assistant, are you finished?”

Another person was there, in the midst of that empty chaos, in the dead of night, dragging equipment too, following the first man’s orders.

“A… almost there, doctor! Almost there! This thing’s heavy!”

“But you are a chad in the making! You can do everything!”

“Y… yes, sir!”

“Good. That’s the right attitude.”

Zonta let a smile take over his face, brushed his bushy sideburns. That assistant right there, he truly was an absolute unit. Originally, he didn’t have any real expectations for him, but that guy, a guy whose name he didn’t even take care of learning, not only pulled him out of jail while everyone else was scrambling away in panic, but also remained there with him, despite the looming danger. Lagash needed chads like him: in Zonta’s eyes, he was proof that mankind was not just a bunch of useless crying passive cowards. Still, being thrown into a cell right after his very successful speech felt like the vilest form of betrayal. Of course that Van Perens idiot couldn’t see his brilliance. Of course Prime Minister Herz wouldn’t understand the scale, the absolute resonance of his actions. He was surrounded by frauds, frauds with no idea of how the world truly worked. By eating them alive, that nanoswarm did him a huge favor. Now, without a budget center to question his choices, he was truly free to completely exhaust and burn all the money in the research team account. After all, who needed money during an apocalypse?

“Doctor? According to the broadcasts, the swarm will make contact in around fifteen minutes. Proceeding with a speed of, huh, around one meter per second. That hasn’t changed.”

“How many of our satellites are still accessible?”

“Around seventy-five percent of our fleet. Lagash is shooting them down one by one, as soon as their orbits cross the active range of her cannons. We still have enough coverage for a reliable uplink, fortunately. God bless redundancy.”

Cannons. Lagash was equipped with heavy weapons designed to destroy small impactors during her century-long travel in space. Nobody expected them to still be operational, but that was logical, in hindsight. The nanoswarm that kept the seedship in a pristine state for a whole millennium had to be taking care of the weaponry too. Now, Lagash was using that weaponry to shoot down all means of communication, with fast rockets that blasted all artificial satellites to pieces. A huge universal reset, that was what the seedship was going for. New Netherlands was just the first casualty. Today, New Babylon. Tomorrow, the world. But that was the wrong way to look at it. Even if all that destruction was not hot at all – especially after all the arousal he got from listening to Lily’s speech, making him want to be stepped on like Van Perens was – the perspective of peeking into pre-Lagash mankind tech was sexy as heck. Zonta adjusted his specs. Even being betrayed by his daughter and charged as a terrorist wasn’t going to stop him from fulfilling his destiny as the chaddest of them all. So, there he was, assembling an array of all the sensors he could rip out of his lab, out of the whole precinct, switching them on in an empty greenhouse to catch a glimpse of how the swarm ticked. The videos spreading like wildfire on the comnet were a great source of information, but they had too many limitations. Despite that, two things were clear, two aspects that his colleagues from other countries would have surely picked up too, if they weren’t too occupied by dealing with the blame game and political instability. Having all the leaders of the planet wiped out in one go wasn’t going to help with international relationships – Eastcol was probably already planning a retaliatory nuclear strike on New Babylon. Which meant that, whatever his stance on the topic, his time was limited. He had to make do what the hand he was dealt, hoping one of his esteemed peers could fill the holes in his weak theory. After all, Zonta was a bioengineer, not a physicist, not a roboticist. Robot butts were at the bottom of his attractiveness scale. Physics was only good for modeling and simulating jiggling breasts and thighs under a plethora of different conditions. So, he never cared for them. Which meant that his read of the situation was just an immense stretch of his inhuman chadness to fill the gaps. Despite his lacking understanding in fields that didn’t involve his personal interests, those two things he identified had to lead somewhere.

First: the nanoswarm avoided devouring itself. That was probably a given in any such weapon of mass destruction, but that meant, unquestionably, that they had at least some way to communicate with each other and avert mutual annihilation.

Second: the nanoswarm left the seedship alone, even while eating everything else. Humans. Rhizomes. Buildings. Military barracks. Tanks. Weapons. Even the whole of Aralu. But not the seedship, not by a long shot. So, there had to be a mechanism by which the nanos recognized what to eat and what not to eat.

At least, the mystery of the ancient satellite and the mummy was finally solved: there was, indeed, a previous loop. A loop that ended as badly as theirs, for reasons unknown. The first message was the last desperate plead of a dead civilization. Probably they couldn’t even finish transmitting the full text – Lagash must have killed them before. As for the mummy of the eighth vault, it had to be a poor sod that got sealed into it after disregarding the closing timer. Lagash preserved his body after sterilizing the room. Somehow, the nanos weren’t involved in that case, though. Which made Zonta grit his teeth, thinking about the absolute idiocy of that failsafe system. What if mankind lived in symbiosis with another alien species? What if human DNA diverged with time, enough not to register as ‘human’ for the seedship’s scanner? What if mankind created a companion species, much like his daughters? Those Terran idiots were driven by despair. Seeing their planet devoured by an alien nanoswarm had to take a toll on their minds. Probably, unleashing their own nanoswarm, a nanoswarm that they were indeed able to produce, wasn’t even enough to reverse course or was deemed too dangerous – what if it attacked humans too? Maybe just before the seedships were launched? So many hypotheticals. So many acts of cowardice. A true chad president would have congratulated the aliens and given them the keys to all of human tech, instead of going full genocide route. Yet, crying over the spilled milk, musing on the ifs and buts was completely unproductive. Especially, when the time to act was so short.

He plugged yet another device on the power supply, in a tangle of wires and cables that would have made a safety officer faint and have two heart attacks in a row. Then, he switched on his computers, one by one, looking at them boot up.

“Ten minutes to contact, doctor!”

“It will be enough. All we need is ten seconds of data, assistant. Ten seconds! So, go back and finish setting up the dishes, cameras and mics. We can’t let anything go to waste. Sound. Pictures. Speed profiles. Thermal scans. Electromagnetic waves. Nuclear radiation. Biosignals. Chemical traces. Smoke detectors. Alcohol tests. Drug tests. I want everything, and I mean everything, we can field, no matter how stupid it looks!”

Of course he didn’t expect the alcohol and drug testers from the traffic units to yield any useful data – unless the nanoswarm was stoned and under the influence while eating – but he wouldn’t leave any stone unturned. He glanced back, looked at the antenna. He placed it in the farthest corner away from the swarm’s approach direction. Even when everything was destroyed, the data would have been sent till the end. That made him giggle, in a ‘suck it, ancient humans’ way. He had proved his superiority once more, in a way that stoked the flames of his self-worth.

He tapped a series of switches, causing the monitors to spring to life. All sensors reported back. The self-diagnosis modules started scanning for issues and restoring old measurement profiles. Zonta pushed a combination of keys to skip the lengthy introduction entirely and load the calibration routines instead. All the data had to be precise, to the point of perfection. A small digital clock appeared on the display, ticking down from ninety seconds – the time required to assess the status of the detectors. He pulled down a couple additional levers, switched on two additional computers. His assistant did the same, carrying a last batch of sensors, spreading them around the greenhouse, connecting them together, like the industrious ant he was. Zonta grinned, raised his thumb up.

“Good, good! Everything in place, I take it?”

“Everything. We stripped this place naked, doc. There’s nothing else we can install.”

“Perfect. Simply perfect. Once you verify the connection, run to the garage and check if the motorbikes have finished charging too. Otherwise, it will be all for nothing, assistant. One of us must survive to tell the tale, yes?”

“I’ve been there already. I’ve prepared two of them for immediate take off. Most of the streets are already closed or jammed with cars, but with the bikes we should…”

“Yes. Like chads. Driving away in the night. While everything else explodes. What was that movie? ‘Seventh Dawn’? I frickin’ loved it. The threesome scenes were so good. And that sequence where the female lead rides a chopper in the nude? I could watch it all day long, assistant.”

“…I… huh, honestly couldn’t, doctor. Makes me feel dirty”

“I know, I know. You have standards. You have decency. You have respect for other human beings. I rejected all those feelings a long time ago, in the path of finding my true self. No regrets.”

Zonta glanced at the clock. The time was slowly ticking down. He inputed a list of commands on the keyboards, booted up all sensors. Now, he was seeing everything. Hearing everything. Detecting everything. There was nothing, nothing that could escape his artificial senses. He didn’t know the meaning of half the values he was recording, truth be told, but it wasn’t an issue. People smarter than him could figure the rest out. Switching the sensors on and setting them up to detect the right thing – for any suitable definition of ‘thing’ – was what he was good at. He smirked. Not even the Panopticon system had as much coverage as him in that moment. He felt like the god of peeping toms, with eyes everywhere, able to see everything in a way no other human could. Though, in the back of his brain, the wound, the realization of having been played by his daughters, was still eating at him. That catgirl porn on Lily’s tablet… it was a trap, a honeypot engineered for him and him alone. He fell into it head first. That mistake allowed his creatures to access his files, his tech, even the parts he never showed to anybody. That gave them enough knowledge to pull off that stunt at the Turn. He didn’t know whether to feel proud or betrayed by that awesome display of cunning.

“Like dad, like daughter. Oh, my, the perfection! I’ve been played like a fiddle. You are so worth tens of Lacrimas, Lily! Oh, Lily! You truly are a chad, the best, chaddest chad I’ve ever created!”

“Doctor?”

“Huh, don’t worry, assistant, it’s not about you. I was just, huh, reminiscing – that’s the word I guess.”

The calibration routines turned all green, one by one. The entire mesh of sensors returned data back to Zonta’s systems. A couple clicks more, activating the uplink with the surviving satellites. The data flowed, in a continuous stream, broadcast using the highest priority thanks to the credentials they found in the communication officer’s room. For all intents and purposes, they were saturating government network channels with sensor readouts, whether that was allowed or not.

“Five minutes to contact.”

“Good. Let them come.”

Zonta leaned back on the small chair he brought with him, joined his fingers. Three hundred seconds. Three hundred seconds till the swarm arrived. The lights of the buildings in the distance started to fade. Towers crumbling. Concrete turning to dust. Whatever people were still there were being turned into a nondescript soup of molecules. More and more of the urban texture of New Babylon disappeared under his eyes. Two hundred seconds. The enemy was at the gates. He smirked, turned to his last companion.

“Go to the garage, take a bike and run. You have enough head start. If you don’t go now, you’re food for nanos too.”

The assistant blinked, seemingly not understanding. Zonta laughed, laughed from the bottom of his heart.

“I said go! Go, my chad assistant! Go and leave this man behind!”

“But… Dr. Zonta! You…”

“Oh, shut up and run! The only regret I have is that I will never be stepped on by Captain Commander Lily… because I’m going to die here, now. There’s no way this ain’t happening. Sure, I can setup everything and run with you, but what if something goes wrong? No, I want to choose the way I say goodbye to this planet. I won’t whimper. I won’t ride my motorbike in the moonlight with you while everything else explodes, assistant – even if that sounds damn cool. I will stand my ground. Like a chad.”

He turned towards the only other person in the room, flaunting the odd shirt he grabbed out of his lockers just for that occasion, a shirt that won against his premium hazmat suit with a similar pattern. He wanted to be freer to move, comfortable. So, the shirt was it, though going away without having worn his hazmat gear even once made him sad. Still, not sad enough to give up on mentoring his last faithful supporter till the very end.

“So, please, fulfill my dream in my stead and let Lily step on you, won’t you? That’s all uncle Zonta asks you. And, now… run! Come on, run!”

The assistant swallowed a lump of saliva, nodded, scrambled away, before finally turning back, running, running as fast as he could, running to get a head start on the nanowave, in the one hundred twenty seconds left before contact. Zonta smirked, turned back to his displays.

“Good boy. Now, let’s finish this.”

He turned a knob, pushed a button, let the cameras frame his face. Then, he toggled one more switch. Lights went up. He was on air.

“Hello, world. I’m Dr. Graham Zonta, calling from what’s left of the New Babylon’s Peacekeeper central precinct. I’m uplinking data on the Lagash nanoswarm from all the sensors I could install in this soon-to-be-destroyed place. Whatever you think you can have, you’ll have it. So, keep your channels open, because a whole truckload of juicy numbers is coming, thanks to your one and only friendly chaddy daddy head scientist.”

The glass panels of the greenhouse started to crack. The metal panels riddled with holes. The nanoswarm. Was finally there. Less than one hundred meters away from him. He joined his hands, all while the first windows atop the building disappeared.

“Sounds. Pictures. Radiation readings. Biosignals. Electromagnetic waves. Alcohol test results. Everything. I’m sending you everything.”

The walls of the precinct turned to dust. The grass. The trees. Started to disappear too, replaced by ash. The outer sensors started being consumed, then the cabling, the power units. Yet, the computer kept sending, the satellite kept receiving, broadcasting the data. Everything. Everything with the utmost priority.

“And I’m dying here. In a blaze of glory. Like a chad. Because I can. It’s my choice.”

The microphones, the cameras were next. All the trees decomposed, the dirt pushed upside down, as the walls, the doors around him turned to scraps, before being deleted from reality. The electromagnetic sensors. The alcohol testers. The chemical probes. Eaten too. The displays started to show error after error, turning dark. One screen switched off.

Zonta felt the tip of his big toe going away. He smirked one last time.

“If you really really want to thank me for my service…”

As his legs started disappearing, as the table, the chair too lost their shapes, their consistence, as emptiness took hold of him, he forced his lungs, his diaphragm to contract, to deliver a final message.

“…please, please, take care of my hot plant daughters. And let them step on y…”

His voice trembled. Stopped. His lungs were gone. His chest gone. His neck gone. His specs fell on the chair, on what was left of it, before being devoured too.

Leaving nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

No trace that a human being had been sitting there.

Graham Zonta.

Was no more.

The greenhouse. The precinct.

The cables. The power lines.

The antennas.

The satellite dishes.

Were no more too.

But his data.

His last speech.

His legacy.

Was alive.

Broadcast into the ether.

Watched by millions of people.

Collected in thousands of data drives.

Etched in eternity.

Written in history.

Till humanity endured, Zonta would exist too.

Like the chad he always wanted to be.