Part II: Katechon

“And I saw an angel standing in the sun, who cried in a loud voice to all the birds flying in midair, “Come, gather together for the great supper of God, so that you may eat the flesh of kings, generals, and the mighty, of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all people, free and slave, great and small…” – Revelation 19:17-18

XVIII.

Peter I Island, Antarctica – April 1st, 2239

POP! The sound rang out, echoing from one end of the hall to the other. Elizabeth yipped and covered her head sending her glasses flying out in front of her. She let out a sharp hiss as the cord to the Smart-glasses tugged out of her neural-control-interface. “Dammit Rodney, enough!” She snapped as she reeled in her HUD device. “Nearly ripped my NCI out. It’d be bad enough if you broke the glasses, but you break my head and I’ll break yours! Got me?”

“Shit, Beth, it’s April fools,” whined Rodney, a lithe man who figured himself the class clown of the research base. He was not. “Lighten up!”

“The only thing foolish about today is your damned self,” Beth said scoldingly as she pulled her heavy head of twists into a ponytail. “You’re a goddamn scientist and you should act like one. Ugh – now you’re making me take the LORD’s name in vain. Tch – so help me, boy…”

“Tch yourself. You’re a scientist too,” he rudely answered with a half-hidden roll of his eyes, averting his gaze as he muttered, “and yet you still believe in that crap.”

“It’s about tradition, jackass,” spat Beth with a tone that did everything to underline the curse. “Do I believe there’s a magical sky wizard listening to all my wants and wishes? No, because that’s crazy. But at least it isn’t half as crazy as you believing that you’re funny.”

That got more than a couple chuckles from the other side of the mess hall, and like always when Rodney was laughed at and not with, he muttered a curt ‘whatever’ and made his retreat. Elizabeth rolled her eyes so hard she almost thought they’d pop out. Rodney was harmless, rude and a prick, but harmless. Elizabeth, on the other hand, was not. Four years as a frontline combatant made sure of that. And in that time, she had been in sixty-five skirmishes on-world and off, most of which had gone her way. Being able to skillfully pilot a fifty-ton assault ship with her mind was usually enough to sway any battle. It was funny, she thought, how the war just kind of faded away once everyone had food and power. In all honesty, as utopian as it was, a large part of her actually looked unfavorably upon it all. Rodney was wrong – she was a soldier, not a scientist. Elizabeth had truly loved her job and every gory detail that came with it, but no one needed soldiers anymore – especially ones with advanced cybernetics.

So, with the war come to an end, she was forced to retire, and so far, retirement sucked. The work was good, but the people? The people she couldn’t stand. It was a whole lot like when she had to babysit the neighbor’s kids when she was fourteen, but the kids were all the smartest people on the planet with the collective maturity of a singular toddler who just heard the word ‘no’ for the first time. None of them actually knew what the world was really like outside their little bubbles. They all grew up in cushy homes with unlimited resources at their disposal, and went to cushy schools their unfathomably rich parents paid for. The war had never reached them – the ‘Haves’ as they called them in the Corp. They never had to fight for a damned thing in their lives and it showed. If it just wasn’t for the people, Elizabeth thought sourly, retirement probably wouldn’t suck so damn bad.

If Rodney was the class clown, Beth played the school loner, and she liked it that way. Luckily enough, none of her work at the Peter I base required much cooperation with her peers, not that they could really understand what her work was. She didn’t even understand, and she was their specialist. Elizabeth stared down at her half-eaten lunch and let out a dissatisfied hiss before standing up then dumping it into the trash. Back to work, she thought; back to… It. Three months ago, they had flown her in from her nice and cozy Miami apartment to that frozen wasteland because they needed her skill with an NCI device. They wanted her to use it to ‘talk’ to something. She said no, but she also owed a favor to the project head, so she went anyways. They didn’t tell her what that something was however, not until she got there. Beth had figured it was a new A.I. system, maybe even the rumored Akosha unit she had heard whispers of, or maybe just some new war machine judging by her military background. But, in the end, it was neither.

With her hands stuffed in the pockets of her lab coat, Elizabeth strode down the long hallway that led to her workstation. At the end she stood in front of a pair of large reinforced doors that boasted two signs. One read: Evocation Room; while the other read: Doors to remain locked at all times. She let out a nasally hiss and booted the door. “Open up, Elijah!” Beth hollered. “Rodney ruined my lunch, so I want to get back to work.” The doors groaned even louder than the man behind them as the manual lock was twisted and pulled. With a loud click the doors were cranked inward by a huffing and puffing tech at the wench. “Ease up there, Vader,” Beth mused as she strode in. “Gonna have a heart attack.”

“Ha-ha,” said Elijah through the grainy speakers of his hazmat suit as he immediately began to crank again, this time to close the doors. “I should have never shown you those movies… No way I’m being in here without a suit. Who knows what kind of crap that thing is putting out!”

That ‘thing’ was the something she was there to talk to: a pillar of white metal seemingly grown straight up out of the elevated platform it stood upon at the center of the room. The strange crystal shaped device was hooked up to twenty-four large server units of much more mundane make, but by no means less impressive. Elizabeth estimated that they had enough computing power in the room to control an entire fleet of warships. “No electronics, right?” Elijah asked as always.

“No,” Beth answered in a monotone voice, as always. “Just my NCI – which, as you can imagine, I need.” Elijah huffed and threw his arms up before plopping back into his chair. He muttered about needing new magazines but for the most part ignored her. Good, she didn’t need or want any distractions. Elizabeth walked over to the device and sat down beside it. She slid a hand over the white metal and offered a half-whispered greeting before reaching behind it for the NCI cord. Plugging it into one of the empty ports in the side of her head, her mind instantly filled with static, low and dull, but as unending as the void she felt herself falling into.

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A new A.I., or some new military project – she couldn’t have been further from the truth. The day she arrived the local project head, a one Dr. Robins, had pulled her aside into his office. What he told her there she still had trouble believing; that twelve years ago, there on the island, they had uncovered evidence of a race of beings that had lived millions of years before man walked the earth; incredibly advanced beings that left behind a series of stone tomes of non-terrestrial origin. One of those tomes was still in their possession, he told her: the Evocationis Libro – or the Book of Evocations. It was from that tome that they drew out the arcane blueprints for the device she was now plugged into. It was called ‘The Beacon’, and as the name implies, it was supposed to shine out into the void and make contact with something. A terribly stupid idea that Elizabeth couldn’t believe they actually went through with, but they did – they built it and called loudly out into the void, ‘Here I am!’ And something answered back.

At first the data they received was unintelligible, but then it quickly became malicious. It, whatever it was, infiltrated their systems and tried to take control of every bit of tech in the immediate area. Some kind of incident occurred that the staff was reluctant to speak of, and men died, but they couldn’t just abandon the project so they put it in a cage, one it couldn’t escape. That’s when they called her in to make sense of the senseless by doing what none of the eggheads had the balls to do – talk to it on its own level.

Elizabeth felt herself fall from a great height as her mind filled with blackness. She fell through the shadow and into the great speckled depths of the stellar void beyond. There she drifted as if through water, drawn to where she needed to go upon a river in that vast sea of stars. Letting herself become one with the ebb and flow of infinity, she felt herself traverse through time and timelessness. Elizabeth watched as the sun bisected the sky above her a thousand times as she shifted through all stages of life. One breath she was herself, another old and frail, and another a child again full of joy and wonder. But when she reached her destination at last, she did so as herself again. There she reached out and touched the darkness, and from the nothing grew life. A patch of grass spilled out around her, spreading like a verdant bruise with each new beat of her heart. She stood now on solid ground with a path in front of her leading back into the sea of endless night sky. Beth reached for her crucifix but found only bare skin. It was as it always was when she dove into the depths of the Beacon, but staring into it, into that infinite void, was never easy. It was enough to drive most people mad, but thanks to her years of mental training she was able to cope – if only barely.

Each step forward felt like pins and needles dancing across her body, mind, and soul. In her heart she knew that this was a place that was never meant to be seen by mankind – a forbidden garden that they were intruding upon. But she wasn’t alone in her intrusions of that voidic space; she could hear it now, the soft beats of hooves. Elizabeth turned around to find the path behind her gone, replaced by a field of flowing wheat, shining gold even under a now eclipsing sun. No, she thought, her gaze turned skyward, not eclipsing, but rotting black outward from the core. She turned back to the field, and at its center now grazed a single lamb. As she drew near she found it fed not upon the stalks of wheat, but upon flesh and bone. It tore away at it like a hound, ripping pieces off with harsh jerks of its head. Elizabeth watched in apprehensive silence, but dared to drop her eyes to the body. It looked human, but also not. It looked like her, but also everyone she had ever known all at once. It looked both alive and wholly dead. It was and was not, as everything in the voidic realm seemed to be.

The Lamb raised its crown of seven horns and met her eyes with seven of its own. The river of life flowed freely down its chin and pooled at its hooves, enveloping the avatar of man. Elizabeth closed her eyes but for a second and when she opened them she found herself in the avatar’s place upon the earth. Wiping the blood from her eyes, she stood, and the halo of blood rose with her, a disk of crimson at the back of her head. The Lamb was further off now, standing on a strip of land that faded into the stars that backed it. This was further in the reality than she had ever reached before, and that scared her. Before she could never reach the Lamb, never truly see it. But now… Now she felt as if it were guiding her, leading her to something. To what, Elizabeth couldn’t imagine, but she followed anyways – she couldn’t help it. She had to follow. Every fiber of her being pulled her forward, and with each forward step, those fibers seemed to unravel. Pieces of herself broke away, and where the fragments were shattered and gone, rays of light shined through.

Elizabeth walked, ran, and crawled upon the seemingly endless corridor with the Lamb forever out of reach. Only as soon as the final piece of herself crumbled to dust, giving way to that light within, did she reach it. But, by then, she was no longer Elizabeth but a being of will and thought, of soul and spirit. That being fell to their knees before the Lamb, and it lowered its crown upon them, pressing into their very existence with its seven horns. In that instance, the being of light saw what was, what would be, and what was possible to come; they saw the river of time split apart from the Lamb’s cosmic sea. They saw the first battle and the last, and every version of each play out to glorious and catastrophic ends. “Why?” the being of light begged. “Why are you showing me this? It’s… It’s too much!”

They screamed in pain and confusion as they tried to make sense of the infinite, of the endless possibilities leading into endless futures, of the explosive expansion as everything there ever was and ever will be tried in vain to fill the void of infinity. But then it did end. The all-spanning canopy of branches on the tree of life all reached for one conclusion in the end. One possible future. The only future that ever mattered. It ended in the blackness of an oil slick, in shadow, in rot and atrophy. It ended in a whimper. The being screamed and cried, but the Lamb’s voice drowned it out in its eternal depth. “The end is near. The horns sound,” the voice of existence said, a voice of every voice combined. “Do you hear them? As the earth shakes and waters boil and turn bitter with taint, will you fight? Or, as the skies fall, will you flee to the mountains, return to the caves? The horns sound, Living One. Do you hear them? Will you answer their call? They will speak ‘I AM’ and their voice shall shake the Heavens and open the Gate. It is time now, the End Times. The seals are all broken, and war is upon you – the Final War. Will you fight or will you fall as all others have before you? But you cannot do it alone. I see that now. Prophecy, ministry, instruction, courage, generosity, guidance, compassion: these Seven Spirits I give to you, Living One. Call upon them at your darkest hour and may they light your way unto salvation.”

The being of light fell, and the further they fell away from the Lamb, the more they became she, and she became Elizabeth again piece by piece. Time and space returned to her, followed by consciousness and feeling – and, most notably, faith. It had been tradition, passed through her family since forever, but she had never believed, not truly. Elizabeth stared up at the white plated ceiling of the Beacon’s chamber, surrounded by frantic medical staff and one very afraid Tech. She stared as life returned to her, as air was pumped into her lungs, and faith flooded her heart. For the first time ever she believed in GOD. She believed.