Chapter 1
A Not-So-Hostile Takeover.
Welcome to the Collective.
Organic nanobots have clustered in your brain to connect you and the rest of the human population to our Collective network. This has been done to you so that information may be imparted directly. Knowledge about the Collective, our rule of law, and how humanity will function within our society will be uploaded directly to your consciousness shortly.
Please remain calm while the delinquents in your society are culled.
If you are reading this message, you are not one of the members being culled and need not fear you will be culled. Information has been provided as to why each individual has been culled. This information may be traumatic. We apologize for this.
That’s what I saw the first second of the first day the Peacekeepers invaded Earth and took complete control. It was written in happy yellow letters, the kind that put you at ease while 5% of your population are summarily executed.
The Peacekeepers were big on putting people at ease. That was the first bit of information they uploaded to my brain. The second was that the masters of this Collective were called the Peacekeepers, clarifying the first confusing fact. The third fact was that most wouldn’t miss the 5% they culled once we understood the reasons behind these harsh measures.
Those three facts mashed together forged an emotional connection between the Collective and myself which hadn’t existed a second before. It made me feel grateful for their help and distracted me as my HR manager dropped dead, with a long list of infractions above her head.
Brenda had been trying to cancel the vacation time she’d approved. Six months ago, I’d handed over my vacation request in writing and made her sign it. That’s the sort of thing you had to do with Brenda. She was a small, petty woman, who enjoyed finding any excuse to make others miserable.
Work didn’t even need me next week.
I’d checked.
One second, she was trying to weasel out of letting me go, giving me longwinded and empty excuses for why I needed to stay, and the next, her fat face was on the desk. By then, I was too distracted to notice. Suddenly seeing words floating before you unsurprisingly makes you wonder how the words got there and whether or not you were having some sort of bizarre medical event.
I read the last line, concerned for my health and mental status. Then I dropped my gaze to her corpse. I’m not going to lie; seeing her dead made me feel better about the words I was seeing. It leant them a lot of credibility, even if it confused me further.
Brenda looked like she’d gone to sleep, except sleeping people didn’t have paragraphs floating above them. I started reading the reasons she’d been culled. They weren’t the petty tyrant reasons I expected. Her favourite pastime was encouraging people over the internet to commit suicide, working on them for months until they finally did it. Since the early 2000’s, she’d managed to kill seven people this way. She’d tried to do it with more, a lot more, but failed.
I’d like to say I was surprised by her actions, but I wasn’t. I’d told Ted numerous times that she was evil. Now I could prove it.
My gaze switched between the messages and her corpse. The absurdity of the situation shielded me from the reality of what was happening. However, my heart rate slowly started to speed up as I realized this may, in fact, not be a dream. Just before I began to panic, I was filled with a serene sense of calm, like everything in the world was perfect and safe.
I wanted to panic.
Everything in life that led me to this moment said I should be panicking, but my body and mind wouldn’t let me. I was calm.
So very, very calm.
I reached over and picked up her arm, feeling her warm, oily skin. I checked her wrist for a pulse. I didn’t find one. I let go and her arm flopped onto the desk, with a dull, meaty thud.
I paused, struggling to process my thoughts through the overly calm haze.
The decent thing to do was to try and help. I considered giving her CPR. There was nothing to prove that the accusations floating above her were true besides a gut feeling that they were. There was also nothing to prove that the words I was seeing weren’t some sort of medical event.
Someone in the hallway outside her office screamed.
I calmly turned to the door, figuring I should see what that was about. Someone might be in trouble, someone who wasn’t trying to kill people over the internet. If they weren’t, I’d come back and decide what I wanted to do.
Before I left, I grabbed the letter she had signed months ago that approved my time off and headed for the door. My name, Morgan Bartholomew Winchester, and my job description, Senior Statistician, were printed at the top of the page. I tucked it in my pocket as I stepped into the hallway.
Whiteman’s Toothpaste was far from the biggest toothpaste company in the United States. In fact, the last time it had been in the top 10 was the 1980s. That was also the last time they redecorated the building. The wood panelling and worn shag carpets that always smelled a little dusty were so far out of fashion that they would probably come back into fashion if they survived a few more years. There were multiplugs and power cords everywhere, to compensate for the 1980s number of electrical outlets the building had, making the hallways and offices an electrician’s nightmare.
My co-workers were down the hallway, gathered outside Ted’s office, muttering to each other. I made my way over, watching my step, and checking the faces, hoping to see concern. I didn’t see any. They were all calmly talking about the words. That reassured me that I wasn’t insane, as I squeezed my way through, pretending to be trying to reach my office. Really, I just wanted to see what the fuss was about.
Ted worked in the office beside me, or at least he had. He was dead, slumped over his keyboard.
I liked Ted.
He’d convinced me to help at the soup kitchen with him once a fortnight. Afterward, we’d go bowling. We even went out for a beer after work every Friday to bitch about HR. And we swapped memes a few times a day.
So, I was shocked to see him dead. He was the last person I’d expect to be a serial killer. But the names of the people he’d killed, and the locations of their bodies were there for everyone to see. Apparently, he’d been using the soup kitchen to find his victims.
Did that make me an accessory?
No, probably not, since I was still alive.
At worst, it made me gullible.
As the seconds ticked by, more information was uploaded to my brain. All of a sudden, I knew that the dead were murderers, rapists, Karens, Kyles, crooked politicians, and even more crooked corporate types. Not everyone who fell into these categories was being executed, only those who were the worst offenders or possessed no ability to change. The Peacekeepers were trying to build a more stable society for humanity as we were integrated into the Collective.
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I was way too calm for what was going on. So was everyone else. Except for that one scream, everyone was acting like nothing out of the ordinary was happening. The Peacekeepers must have been doing something to our brains to help ease us into the universe at large and humanity no longer being in charge of its own fate, because this wasn’t normal.
I should have been unsettled, but I couldn’t get worked up enough to feel that way.
More information trickled in, and I discovered the Peacekeepers were big on using the carrot instead of the stick. They didn’t want to hurt us. They wanted to help us. But that help came at a price. We had to earn it. We had to play the Game.
Janet, another of my co-workers, turned to me. She was in her 40s and was advertising it with her I don’t get paid enough to care attitude. She had her grey, blonde hair tied in a mom bun and a blouse with a small peanut butter stain on the shoulder. She’d been passed over for promotion so many times she’d given up trying. She’d quiet-quit a few years ago and was happier now than when I’d started working here.
“I think we’re supposed to go home,” she said, sounding like her own statement confused her.
I found myself nodding. “They’re going to connect us to the Game.”
Janet didn’t seem to hear me as she pointed to the window. “Look.”
Ships shaped like grey potatoes the size of towns had come down through the clouds over Portland, Oregon. Hundreds of thousands of tiny drone potatoes spread from them like flocks of starlings, off to start their work.
“You should go pick up your kids,” I said.
“Dan’s on his way to get them.” She frowned, confused. “How did I know that? This is strange.”
“Very strange,” I agreed.
It occurred to me as Janet walked away that I’d lost my job. The odds of me still having it when I got back from my holiday were low. I’d been aware that a computer program was going to take it at some point. I’d never guessed it would be an alien computer program.
I decided to clean out my desk.
I stepped into my office, a cramped room that was barely big enough to let someone sit on both sides of my desk, and picked up my 1st place trophies from the tower defence tournaments I’d won, along with the two personal photos I had there. One was my last family picture with my parents and brothers before my mom died. The other was of Buster when he was a puppy, back when he was a cute ball of fluff.
Buster was now fourteen, which was old for a golden retriever. He was near the end of his life. I was trying to make the time we had left count. I tucked the photos under my arm and left my office.
The information flooding my brain started to explain what the Game was. It wasn’t a game. It was business, adventure, and war. An entire galaxy set up for the sapient species of the Collective to interact through robotic avatars. It was only a game because it wasn’t permanent. Our avatars could be destroyed, but we wouldn’t be harmed.
We wouldn’t be in there full-time, either. There seemed to be something called a Cycle. It was exactly eighty-four hours or three and a half days – half a week. It was based off our time measurements because we were the newest species to join the Collective. We would be in the Game for a Cycle. Then we would be out of the Game for a Cycle.
After the first 100 cycles in-Game, two years from now, we would be free to connect and disconnect when we wanted to. I already knew we would want to stay. The rewards for participation filled my head. If I’d been able to feel awe, I would have felt it with every cell in my body.
There was something called a Token. I could earn them for playing the Game. If I earned enough, 10,000 to be exact, I’d be able to buy Buster a rejuvenation treatment, a medical procedure that would give him back his youth, adding another decade onto his lifespan. That was reason enough for me to want to play. But there were hundreds of thousands of other miracles I could purchase. So many that I knew I wouldn’t be able to buy them all even if I spent the next millennia playing.
The nerd in me began to wonder why this Collective didn’t just use virtual reality, if they were so advanced. No sooner did I have that thought than the answer came to me. They had. A very long time ago. An alien had managed to upload a virus. In the space of a few seconds, the virus spread through the virtual world and 86% of the sapient species in the universe were dead.
They didn’t want to repeat this experience, so instead of virtual reality, they used avatars far away with a bunch of safety systems, so we weren’t networked.
It was all very strange.
I made my way to my beat-up grey sedan, following the impulse to go home, still thinking about the fact that at some point, the majority of sapient life in the universe was killed by the Game and wondering what it was like before that happened.
I started the engine, gave it thirty seconds to warm up and stop screeching, and then headed out of the parking lot, moving into the long line of cars that had formed. Traffic was bad. The worst I’d ever seen. Everyone was trying to go home at the same time. Potato drones flew overhead as I slowly crawled down the freeway to my parents’.
For once, I wasn’t upset by the traffic. I wasn’t upset by anything. I passed more than a dozen cars with corpses inside. Other people were walking out of buildings with dead bodies, only to dump them in the street for collection. They carried on like it was completely ordinary.
The third time this happened, I remembered my HR manager. And that I had meant to go back and perform CPR. Almost an hour had passed at this point, so the odds of her coming back were precisely zero.
I kept driving, wondering how I’d forgotten about her, before getting distracted.
My dad had Buster during the day. When mom passed away, he took early retirement. Her passing had really mellowed him out. He wasn’t the high-strung workaholic he’d been all my life, but he was lonely.
He complained about me leaving Buster with him during the day because real dogs should be able to handle being alone for a few hours, but he’d been happier since I started dropping him off. That’s why I did it. It wasn’t to save money on doggy day care like I told him. It was to help pull him out of his funk. Dropping Buster off at his place added an hour to my daily commute, but I didn’t mind, because Dad was getting better.
I headed out of the city and into the suburbs, parking on the road in front of my parents’ place because Peter and Simon had parked their trucks in the driveway. My parents’ house was an old-school American dream home. There was a white picket fence, a front yard with an oak tree, a bigger backyard, four bedrooms, and two bathrooms. The garage fit two cars, and the lawn always looked freshly mowed. There were even rose bushes and flower beds and a sprinkler system that you could set your watch to.
Dad was waiting for me with Peter and Simon when I got to the front door. My brothers and I were younger version of him. When you put the three of us side by side, people sometimes mistook us for triplets. We’re all six-one, with dark brown hair and the exact same cowlick. All of us have the same year-round tan, the same big jaw, and a large, squashed nose. Our eyebrows and eyelashes were the only features we inherited from our mother. They were thick and luscious and perfectly proportioned to our faces. I’d been told by several women that they helped distract from the terrible nose we’d inherited from Dad.
None of us had taken Mom's passing well. None of our relationships had survived it. Peter had even been engaged. The only good thing to have come from it was that we were all much closer as a family.
They all hugged me a little too tightly as I entered the house. I hugged back just as hard. We all needed reassurance, because of the illusionary calm that gripped us.
Buster seemed to sense something was wrong and went from person to person to offer affectionate hand licks to improve their mood. He wasn’t as energetic about it as he used to be. The love was there, but the energy was gone.
He reminded me of Mom near the end. The way she loosely held my hand, unable to grip tight, because she didn’t have much strength left.
Dad gathered us all in the living room. He’d done some redecorating since Mom passed. Swapping out her fancy lounge suite from France for a three-seater tan leather couch and matching La-Z-Boys, so he could watch ballgames in comfort. They were easier to fall asleep in, and if you spilled dip or beer, you could wipe them clean without any fuss. With mom’s couches, we’d lived in a constant state of fear that we might drop something, even Dad, which is why they were the first thing to go.
Dad took a seat in his recliner, and my oldest brother Peter took the other, leaving me and Simon stuck on the couch.
Dad smiled at us, causing the wrinkles around his eyes to scrunch. The smile was full of fear, sadness, and a whole lot of love. “I’m not sure what’s going to happen next, but I want you boys to know I love you,” his gravelly voice trembled with emotion. “These memories that keep flowing into my head seem to tell of a kind people who don’t want to cause more harm than they absolutely have to, a people who survived a war that could have destroyed our universe and who never want to see this happen again, which is why they’re conquering us. But I’m a pessimist. When this started, I was walking Buster and watched a man calmly pull his car to the side of the road and drop dead. I saw what he was guilty of, and if it is true, it’s better that he is gone. But it may be a lie. And if it is a lie, there is nothing I can do to fight back. There is nothing I can do to save you. So, I want you all to know I love you and that I will never stop loving you.”
We got all touchy-feely as the time counted down to six o’clock. We shared funny memories that had us all smiling. We were too calm to laugh. The information coming to me told me that we would all go to sleep, even Buster. Our bodies would go into a natural hibernation that would leave us hungry and a little thirsty when we woke.
We stayed in the living room. If this was the end, we wanted to be together. If what the knowledge was telling us was true, we wanted to be together even more. We all knew when it was time for the Game to begin because exhaustion overtook us. Dad got out of his chair and kissed us on the forehead. He hadn’t done that since we were children.
As I closed my eyes, the last sensation I had was my father’s tear-stained lips brushing my forehead.