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.

(Proofread and edited by Kaleb O'Halloran)

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 icon, at the red marker with a small white number ticking up and up as time passed. He stared at it without saying a word.

One hundred seventy-eight notifications. No, wait. One hundred seventy-nine. He put the phone back on the stool after switching the screen off, and lay again in his bed, under the sheets. His eyes were fixated on the ceiling, both of them only able to stare 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 continued to lie down, motionless. The alarm clock was glaring at him, its digital numerals informing him that it was past noon, the dark red segments judging him from afar. Yet, he ignored them, his gaze only interested in being directed upward. He didn’t feel like getting up. He didn’t want to get up, at all. He wished he could remain there, stuck in his bed. Like a plant, as it were.

Noise from the streets reached his ears from time to time. Trucks, military cargo units, mobile control centers on tank treads. He could distinguish all of them, just by listening to their hums, the screeches of their tires. He could hear the jet engines, the audio from the speakers around the city 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 on the second floor of an abandoned condo. The last living being still occupying it.

BEEP. 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 will make search and rescue operations much more difficult. Don’t panic. We are coming to help you.”

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

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

He groaned. The notifications were driving 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.

BEEP. 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 most recent ones, 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 typing something in response.

“> I’m safe, Mom. Love you.”

Then, he put the phone down. The network was exploding with activity, so there was a data cap put in place. Phone calls were allowed only when absolutely necessary, with text messages being the only unrestricted communication method – even then, no images or audio could be attached to them. He looked at the alarm clock. Forty minutes past noon. The tyranny of time had gotten the best of him. Finally forcing himself to react, Boost slipped out of the bedsheets, sitting on the mattress in silence. A shower and a coffee were going to be needed to reach at least a semblance of functionality. But he didn’t want to. All he wished for was to lie motionless on that bed, without thinking about anything, blissfully oblivious to the chaos unfolding around him.

That’s when he heard it, that loud, intrusive 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 the emptiness while surrounded by that boisterous bedlam. He stood up slowly, walked to the corridor in his pajamas, his eye bags peeking out from 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 soon, the knocking was accompanied by spoken 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 over a year. The voice of a person who would have been able to rip off 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 that. An investigator from Yard, a walking disaster, a rude bastard known for his unorthodox methods, inflated ego, and for only being soft when it came to his wife Michelle. Of all the people he had expected to show up, EiN wasn’t even remotely on the list. He turned the handle, cautiously opening the door. In front of him, stood that way-too-tall, relatively young-looking man, with spiky, neck-long brown hair and grey eyes, donning grey cargo pants, military boots and a leather jacket with his trademark “1”-shaped golden studs all over it. Hands in his pockets, a serious expression, his eyes gazing down at the inhabitant of the flat, that fifty-something-year-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, of course.

“Why are you here?”

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

“It’s... General Boost, now.”

“Yeah, General, Major, whatever. You were Major Boost when we were pals in Yard, right? I want to talk with that Boost, not this cowardly ‘General Boost’ standin’ in front of my ass right now.”

Boost stared at him, at those inquisitive, intimidating 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. The house was more  spartan than he’d expected from someone in his position. Clean and tidy. A few posters scattered around, mostly of old sci-fi movies and a couple ancient web series. He had eyed one dresser exclusively filled with suits, on his way to the living room. Boost himself certainly didn’t look the part of a general. The tribal tattoo circling his right eye and his red, unruly hair made sure of that. Yet, the man making coffee in front of him was definitely, unmistakably a member of the highest echelons of His Majesty’s army.

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

“Right on the money, H.H.”

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

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

“Of all the names you could give your boy… Sebastian.”

“You don’t like it?”

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

EiN started counting Boost’s names 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 train of thought. 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 will make search and rescue operations much more difficult. Don’t panic. We are coming to help you.”

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

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

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

“Yeah, it’s complicated. But you should still be there, H.H. You’re the right one to lead this operation. I can’t imagine anyone else doin’ it.”

“There are things about me you wouldn’t want to know, EiN.”

“You’re right, I don’t wanna know. But I’ve dealt with ROPES my whole life, and I know one when I see it. And you should too, chief. You sent me to investigate The Walking Night in New Langdon, remember? With Veckert Rainer too. Good pal, that Veckert. Cool-headed and quick-witted. 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 strange distortion of reality that caused the night itself to act as if it were a living creature. Within it, the abstract concept of “night” became a real, living, breathing amalgamation 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, still talking, and apparently surviving several projectiles to the head, despite losing an eye in the process.

As strange and horrifying as the Walking Night sounded, it was nothing compared to the ROP that had enveloped Euterpe in 2065, codenamed “Shadow Gallery.” An eldritch portal into an alien world, which looked almost as if it were produced by a generative AI trained on artistic renditions of Hell. It also continuously spat out those horribly deformed, barely functional abominations, nicknamed “Donners”, at depressingly regular intervals. All that combined to make the Walking Night feel like a child’s first homework assignment by comparison.

What was happening in Shard was on the same level as the Euterpe ROP, only even larger, even more grim, and potentially even more dangerous. At least the Shadow Gallery had the decency to remain stable and not expand over time at an alarming pace.

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

“I only caught wind of one word. No idea what it means.”

“Which word?”

“Rekashiza.”

Boost groaned, shaking his head.

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

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

“Pretty damn sure they can’t.”

Boost sipped a little bit more of his coffee. EiN was one of the few people he felt some 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 it could have been the end of their respective careers, if it surfaced. It made him feel a sense of camaraderie with the towering man. It wasn’t perfect, though – EiN had softened up a bit since his marriage, which was a shame. And, of course, he also wasn’t a member of an underground Masonic-lodge-style lobby marked by a bat insignia, like Boost was.

“Still, H.H., the hell is a rekashiza? All I’m seein’ around are pics of this weird cloud of red pollen and what look like vines comin’ out of it. But we got no direct feed.”

The loud passage of two helicopters interrupted them again.

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

“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 know 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 out seven expedition teams into that hellscape. 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 you think. We have some weak evidence that the ROP in question might extend beyond Earth’s atmosphere, including everything inside EXODUS’s geostationary orbit – and God only knows what outside of that. If that did turn out to be 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 even correct to refer to it as a simple ROP? Or was their Earth, their continued existence, the real anomaly? That was a question Boost wasn’t willing to ask himself, as he feared the potential 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 match their frequency and become part of their broken reality? His mind raced back to the days of his training at Yard, when he was first told what a ROP was. Simpler times. It was after the higher-ups decided to promote-slash-demote 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 perfect place to keep him out of the way. Yet, despite the purely political nature of the 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 many flavors. He remembered how weird it felt, when that unremarkable Japanese man taught him never to stand under a lone, flickering lamp post 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 made by his unit. Boost didn’t know what happened to him after that, and had never heard from him since. He wondered what the old man would have done in his place right now, faced with that monstrous, all-consuming, reality-warping bubble.

“...Anyway, we explored it as best we could, that eldritch mockery of Earth. Or at least 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 Big Ben, but we never got close to them. However, what we found in the place where Shard is in our world... was unexpected.”

“Unexpected?”

Boost stared at EiN, their eyes locked. Neither of them 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 was, until we scraped some material and analyzed it.”

“And?”

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

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

“...right where Hotel Lake Ashiza is. Or, well, where it used to be.”

EiN turned pale, looking as if he had just seen a ghost. Boost sneered, his heart aching. He stood up before reaching for a small cupboard, taking out a couple printed pictures, throwing them on the table. EiN picked them up, examining them with intrigue.

“What the...”

A giant, plant-like structure, surrounded by a thick, crimson mist comprised of dust and pollen. Five massive petals with teeth and hooks equally spaced around a central body, much like a rafflesia flower, and 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 a visible end. The vines were wrapped around nearby 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. That mist is also disrupting all our communication channels, aiming devices, drones, and automated weapons. And it’s getting larger by the minute, though its growth rate has vastly slowed down compared to the first ten hours or so.”

EiN lifted up the second picture, pointing his finger at one odd 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 top of this nightmare. We call them Donners. Disgusting, human-like constructs that show some 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, for some reason, they seem to be able to survive well enough around the rekashiza. As long as they can’t get out of its field of influence, though, I’m not really worried by them. Mindless drones, that’s all they are. Nah, they’re not what worries me.”

Boost snatched the pictures from EiN’s hands, shaking his head yet again.

“And it’s not even the rekashiza itself, really. We can still burn it down with napalm – or a low-altitude nuclear strike, even. 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 rebuild everything, civilians would be saved. Money would flow in naturally for the reconstruction project, and it’d create a lot of jobs, too. Real estate agents sure would have a field day. A good ending for everyone, right? See, one giant plant isn’t much of a chore. We have a plan in place for that, I would just need to issue the order. But...”

He closed his eyes, let himself crumple in his chair.

“...that’s not applicable as a large-scale solution. We can nuke one, sure. Two, maybe. But we can’t just keep doing it. Not if we want our planet to stay habitable, that is.”

“Wait, wait, wait. You’re... you’re 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, snatching another picture from his cupboard before giving it to EiN.

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

“Yes, EiN...”

A cold, defeated smile, the dead eyes of someone far beyond his moral event horizon.

“...There’s thousands of those seeds in the Gallery. Thousands.”

He put a hand on EiN’s shoulder, avoiding eye contact as he stood up.

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

One last long glance at the world outside of the window, at the people scrambling in the streets, the cars jamming the traffic, the dozens of helicopters flying low. The chaos that was already ensuing.

“This is only the beginning.”