Tales from the Bat - Chain of Command

July 2067. The city of Shard is being evacuated, right as an unexpected event has turned the world upside down. In his flat's bed, General Boost is having a hard time getting up and coping with the situation. At least, until an old acquaintance knocks at his door.

An obnoxious beep pierced the silence, yet again. Boost lifted the phone, as the display brightened – a faint, blue halo peeking out in the darkness of the room. His half-closed eyes gazed at the speech bubble, at the red marker with a small white number oscillating in size as time passed. He stared at it without saying a word.

One hundred seventy eight notifications. No, wait. Seventy nine . He put the phone back on the stool, after switching the screen off, lay on his bed, under the sheets. His eyes fixated on the ceiling, both staring at the void of the lightless cubicle. Some stray rays of sunlight were seeping through the shutters, breaching the blackness, scattered by suspended particles of dust, making it easier for him to focus on some details.

Another loud beep. One hundred eighty.

Boost lay down, motionless. The alarm clock was glaring at him, its figures marking past noon, its dark red segments judging him from afar. Yet, he ignored them, staring at the ceiling instead. He didn’t feel like getting up. He didn’t want to get up, at all. He wished he could remain there, stuck on his bed. Like a plant, as a matter of course.

Noise from the streets reached his ears, from time to time. Trucks, military cargo, treaded mobile control centers. He could distinguish all of them, just by listening to their humming, to the screeches of their tires. He could hear the jet engines, the audio from the megaphones calling for a calm, collected response. He should have been there, issuing orders to his men, coordinating the evacuation.

Yet, he wasn’t.

He was lying on a bed, in his four-room apartment at the second floor of an abandoned condo. The last living being still occupying it.

One hundred eighty one.

He kept on staring at the ceiling. It was useless. Everything was useless. He had food and supplies for a month. He could keep staring and staring for a long time, before the inevitable. After all, nobody needed him. He was a failure.

A megaphone, again. Yet another useless announcement.

“The evacuation of the city center is still ongoing. Please, don’t leave your houses until you are directed to. Doing so before will make search and rescue operations much harder. Don’t panic. We are coming for you.”

Good luck evacuating a city as big as Shard in such little time, he thought. In normal circumstances, he would have been front and center in the operation. But these weren’t normal circumstances. Not at all.

One hundred eighty two. One hundred eighty three. One hundred eighty four.

He groaned. The notifications were turning him mad. Switching the sound off would have been so easy, but keeping them on felt like an absolute must. Like pushing the snooze button on his alarm clock every thirty minutes. It made him aware of the passage of time, without forcing him to react.

One hundred eighty five. One hundred eighty six.

That was too much. He couldn’t focus on not thinking, if his phone kept on beeping like that. He grabbed it again, unlocked the screen. Messages. Dozens of messages. He felt he could ignore them. Most of them. The latest, though, were from his elderly mother.

“> H.H. are you safe?”

“> Please, H.H., your dad is worried too.”

“> H.H., once you receive this message, please reply.”

He browsed through the last four messages, all from his mother. He groaned, quickly typed something in response.

“> I’m safe mom. Love you.”

Then, put the phone down. The network was exploding with activity, there was a data cap in place. Phone calls were allowed only when absolutely necessary, only messages were allowed to be sent without limitations, and even then only without any attachments or audio. He looked at the alarm clock. Forty past noon. The tyranny of time had the best of him. Forcing himself to react, Boost slipped out of the bedsheets, sat on the mattress in silence. A shower and a coffee was what he needed, to reach at least a semblance of functionality. But he didn’t want to. All he wished for, was lying motionless on that bed, without thinking about anything, blissfully oblivious to the bedlam unfolding around him.

That’s when he heard it, heard that noise.

A persistent, stubborn knocking at his front door.

Boost sighed. He tried to ignore it, but the noise was unbearable. He couldn’t focus on emptiness, while surrounded by that boisterous bedlam. He stood up, slowly, walked to the corridor in his pajama, his eye bags peeking out of his cheeks, his dead irises following suit.

“... coming.”

The knocking didn’t stop. If anything, it became louder, louder, louder, to the point he instinctively covered his ears to avoid listening to it. And, together with it, came the words.

“High time, Major! Want me to smash yer door to the ground?”

He stopped in his tracks. That voice. A voice he hadn’t heard in more than a year. The voice of a person who would have been able to rip his armored door on a whim, if he so wished.

“EiN?”

“That’d be me, yes.”

EiN, real name Lorenz Kristhhoffer – but nobody was allowed to call him like that. An investigator of Yard, walking disaster, rude bastard, known for his pretty unorthodox methods, inflated ego, and for being a real softie when it came down to his wife Michelle. Of all the people he was expecting to show up, he wasn’t even remotely on the list. He turned the handle, opened the door. In front of him, stood this young-ish, way too tall man, with spiky, neck-long brown hair and grey eyes, donning a leather jacket with golden “one”-shaped studs placed all over it, grey cargo pants and military boots. Hands in his pockets, a serious expression, his eyes gazing at the inhabitant of the flat, that fifty-something-years-old commander who was now staring at him in disbelief.

“You took your sweet time, Major.”

Boost blinked a couple times, hoping for him to disappear like a hologram or a bad dream. In vain.

“Why are you here?”

“A sparrow told me that you shuttered yourself in your fancy house instead of – you know – dealing with the chaos that’s unfoldin’ out there. Not that I blame you, but that’s hardly the Major Boost I knew. Wanted to be sure we were speakin’ ‘bout the same person.”

“It’s... General Boost, now.”

“Yeah, General, Major, yadda yadda. You were Major Boost, when we were pals in Yard, right? I want to talk with that person, not this coward General Boost of my ass.”

Boost stared at him, at those inquisitive eyes. Then he sighed with resignation.

“Come in, please. I was going to have some breakfast.”

Two minutes later, EiN was sitting in the living room, looking around. That house was more spartan than he’d expected from someone in his position. Tidy, clean. A few posters scattered around, mostly of old sci-fi movies and a couple decrepit web series. He eyed one cupboard exclusively filled with suits, on his way to the living room. Boost didn’t look the part of a general. The tribal tattoo circling his right eye and his red, unruly hair also didn’t seem to work well to that goal. Yet, the man cooking coffee in front of him was definitely, unmistakably none other than on member of the highest echelons in His Majesty’s army.

“Here. No sugar, if I remember correctly.”

“Right on your money, H.H.”

“How’s it going with Michelle and your kids?”

“My wife’s fine, thanks. Li’l Sebastian and Jessie are growin’ up hella fast. Fortunately, they’re learnin’ from them mama and not from me. Shame she be French. My dad would be horrified, were he alive.”

“Of all the way you could call your boy, Sebastian.”

“You don’t like it?”

“It’s my seventh name. Of course I don’t like it.”

EiN started counting them on his fingertips. Heinz-Harald Jacob Jessen Damon Lewis Michael Sebastian Boost. Yup, seven, if Heinz-Harald was counted as one. Noise from the streets interrupted his chain of thoughts. Another announcement, the same as before.

“The evacuation of the city center is still ongoing. Please, don’t leave your houses until you are directed to. Doing so before will make search and rescue operations much harder. Don’t panic. We are coming for you.”

Boost sat at the table, took a sip of his coffee. A whisper leaving his lips, almost reeking of defeatism.

“No chance we are doing this in time. Moving one million people away before...”

The sound of helicopter engines overshadowed his words. EiN nodded.

“Yeah, it’s complicated. Yet, you should be there, H.H.. You are the right one to lead this operation. I can’t think ‘bout anyone else.”

“There are things about me you’d rather not know, EiN.”

“I don’t wanna either. But I’ve dealt with ROPES my whole life, and I kno’ one when I see it. And you too, chief. You sent me to investigate The Walking Night in New Langdon, remember? With Veckert Rainer too. Good pal, Veckert. She’s hella neat. But you know, it was her first ROP. A city-wide ROP too, but still her first.”

Boost nodded. The Walking Night. The Reality Oscillation Phenomenon that killed several people in New Langdon. A weird reality marble that caused the night herself to act as if it was a living creature. The abstract concept of “night” had become a concrete, breathing, moving, solid agglomeration with a free will, using a “puppet”, nothing more than a walking corpse, as her conduit. Specifically, the corpse of the individual later identified as Silman Simmerik. Clinically dead, yet still moving, and talking, and apparently surviving several projectiles to the head, despite losing an eye in the process.

As weird as The Walking Night sounded, it was nothing compared with the ROP that had enveloped Euterpe in 2065, codename “Shadow Gallery”. An eldritch portal into an alien world, which looked like something generated by an AI roughly trained on what hell might look like. The same ROP that kept on spitting out horribly deformed or barely functional appendixes, nicknamed “Donners”, at depressingly regular intervals. That made The Walking Night feel like a child’s first homework.

What was happening in Shard was on the same level as the Euterpe ROP, only more macabre and potentially dangerous. At least, the Shadow Gallery had the decency of remaining stable and not expanding over time at an alarming pace.

“Have you seen the pictures, EiN? Does Yard have any idea of what’s happening there?”

“I just got wind of one word. No idea what that means.”

“Which word?”

“Rekashiza.”

Boost groaned, shook his head.

“Way to go, naming department. It was Lake Ashiza, not rekashiza! As in the name of the hotel where the ROP developed, if you weren’t aware of it. Who was the moron in the control center who took the first call? That idiot of Nogawara?”

“East Asians. They’ll never learn proper spelling.”

“Darn sure they can’t.”

Boost sipped a little bit more of his coffee. EiN was one of the few people he felt genuine attachment to. Both of them lacked social skills. Both of them were direct and straight to the point. Both of them were covert racists. That last fact amused him to no end, as that could have been the end of their respective careers, if it surfaced. This made him feel a sense of communality. Of course, EiN had softened a bit after his marriage, which was a shame. And, of course, he wasn’t a member of a mason-lodge-styled lobby with a bat insignia.

“Still, H.H., what do be a rekashiza? All I’m seeing around are pics of this weird cloud of red pollen and what seem to be vines. But we got no direct feed.”

The engines of two helicopters interrupted them again.

“EiN, remember the Euterpe ROP, the Shadow Gallery? Hell, I’m not even supposed to tell you this, but you know, to hell with that. We managed to reverse engineer that, got it?”

“You did what?”

“It’s a long story. What’s important is that we did it. We successfully re-created the ROP that appeared in Euterpe and traversed it. It was like a portal to... this other version of Earth. A dead planet, full of ruins of an industrial civilization and bizarre lifeforms, where no human or animal as we intend them could survive. A distorted version of our world, which seems to have split from our Earth on the day of the Helsinki Disaster or shortly after. We sent seven expeditions. Unfortunately, we lost some good soldiers in the process.”

“A planet-wide ROP? Are you jokin’? That’s insane!”

“It might be even more insane than that. We have some weak evidence that the ROP in question might extend beyond Earth’s atmosphere, including everything inside EXODUS’s geostationary orbit – and only God knows what outside of that. If that were the case...”

Boost gulped down his coffee.

A solar system , galaxy , or even universe- wide ROP. Akin to a parallel reality of sorts. At that point, was it correct to refer to that as a simple ROP? Or was their Earth, their continued existence, the real anomaly? That was a question Boost wasn’t willing to answer, as he feared the conclusions. If they were the anomaly, did that mean that by virtue of sending satellites and probes to space, they were actually expanding it, forcing other regions of the universe to oscillate to their frequency and tune into their broken reality? His mind raced back to the days of his training at Yard, when he was explained what a ROP was. Simpler times. The higher echelons had promoted/demoted Boost the Butcher to get him out of the field, where he had become infamous due to his brutal beatings of nekos and mutants. The newborn Reality Oscillation Phenomenon Task Force was the right place where to park him. Yet, despite the purely political nature of that act, Boost ended up enjoying his time at New Scotland Yard. His mentor was a man called Michio Funabaki, a Japanese specialist who had dealt with ROPES in his home country for more than twenty years. Boost grew to respect him and his experience, which included first-hand close encounters with anomalies of any flavor. He remembered how weird it felt, when that unremarkable Japanese man taught him never to stand under a lone, flickering lamppost on a dead end road. He respected him enough not to question his judgment. Others didn’t get the memo. Not in time to save their hides, at least.

During his active service, Funabaki had dealt with city-block-wide ROPES on a regular basis, but rarely with bigger ones. His story ended with the death of his nephew, his one living relative, due to a mistake of his unit. Boost didn’t know what happened to him ever since, lost track of him. He wondered what the old man would have done, in his place, in front of that monstrous, inexplicable, ever-hungry, reality-warping bubble.

“... anyway, we explored it, that eldritch mockery of our Earth. At least, in the region roughly equivalent to what was once called the Greater London Area. There were ruins that we identified as those of the London Eye and the Big Ben, but we didn’t move nearer. However, what we found in the place where Shard is in our world... was unexpected.”

“Unexpected?”

Boost stared at EiN, their eyes met. None of the two blinked.

“We reached a sort of megalithic structure. At least six meters tall, around three meters wide. We thought it was a menhir, at first, or a statue, or the ruins of something we couldn’t recognize. That’s until we scraped some material for analysis.”

“And?”

“It was a seed, EiN. A gigantic seed. Of a plant that hadn’t blossomed yet, placed...”

Boost crossed his hands, kept his eyes on his guest.

“... right where Hotel Lake Ashiza is. Or, well, was.”

EiN paled, looked as if he had just seen a ghost. Boost sneered, his heart aching. He stood up, reached a small cupboard, took out a couple printed pictures, threw them on the table. EiN picked them up, stared at them.

“What the...”

A giant, plant-like structure, surrounded by a crimson mist, particles of dust, pollen. Five massive petals with teeth and hooks equally spaced around a central body, much like a rafflesia flower, uncountable vines sprouting from what looked like a black hole at its core. A crown of sharp teeth along the border of the “mouth” – a black tunnel without visible end. The vines were wrapped around the buildings, crushing them under their pressure, while even more red pollen was being spit out in a massive cloud. EiN shivered, brought a hand to his mouth, gasping for air. Boost cracked a weak smile.

“That, EiN. That is the rekashiza you’ve heard about. A gargantuan, plant-like xeno-organism that emerged near the center of the Kewtown district, destroying a sizable chunk of real estate and enveloping everything around it in a red, unbreathable mist, which is disrupting all our communication channels, aiming devices, automatic drones and weapons. And, oh, it’s getting larger by the minute, though its growth rate has vastly slowed down, compared with the first ten or so hours.”

EiN raised the second picture, pointed his finger at one detail, a black shape seemingly climbing out of the flower’s mouth . One of many.

“What are those specks, there in the corner? They look like some sort of... creatures?”

“The cherry on the cake. We call them Donners. Human-like constructs that share a semblance of self-consciousness, but can’t live in our world for more than a few minutes, due to the defects in their body structure. Yet, they seem to be able to survive well enough around the rekashiza. As long as they cannot get out of its field of influence, though, I’m not really worried by them. Mindless drones, here’s what they are. Nah, that’s not what worries me.”

Boost snatched the pictures from EiN’s hands, shook his head.

“And not even the rekashiza in itself. We can still burn it down with napalm – or a low altitude nuclear strike. We don’t need to aim for that. Sure, we’d sacrifice a huge chunk of Shard, but the danger would be over, we could reconstruct everything, civilians would be saved, money would flow for the reconstruction works, we would create a lot of jobs, and real estate agencies would have a field day with it. A good ending, right? See, one giant plant isn’t that much of a chore. We have a plan in place for that, I just need to issue the order. But...”

He closed his eyes, let himself crumple on the chair.

“... this is not applicable as a large scale solution. We can nuke one, sure. Two, maybe. But we can’t do it over and over. Not if we want to keep our planet habitable, that is.”

“Wait, wait, wait. You are... talking as if this ain’t an isolated case. Major... no, General Boost. What are you hiding? When you say large scale, you don’t mean...”

Boost stood up, snatched another picture from his cupboard, gave it to EiN.

EiN lost his breath, stared at the man, at the broken general in front of him, stared back at the picture.

“Yes, EiN...”

A cold, defeated smile, the dead eyes of someone who went through his moral event horizon.

“... there’s thousands of those seeds, down there. Thousands.”

He put his hand on EiN’s shoulder, avoiding eye contact, stood up.

“Go back to your wife and children, EiN. Spend as much time you can with them.”

A last stare at the world outside of the window, of the people scrambling in the streets, the cars jamming the traffic, the helicopters flying low.

“This is only the beginning.”