Re-Start Ready - Episode 1: Full Astronaut

“Re-start ready…”

    Karen rubbed her eyes in disbelief. She had been looking at this screen for two weeks now, ever since the blast. This was the first message. 

    Her heart sank. Maybe this was an automated message. Something from before. Microsoft going through the motions. Even though there was no more Microsoft. Even though there was no more anything, as far as Karen knew.

    Where was this message coming from?

    The green letters on the ancient computer screen simply said “Re-start ready…”

    The message had popped up on the screen while Karen drank her instant coffee. It was terrible instant coffee. Crystals. Hot water. Not boiling water. Hot water from the tap. At first, Karen hadn’t even

bothered with sweetener. Psychologists would probably have diagnosed her as depressed then, right after the blast. Even though there were no more psychologists. As far as Karen knew. She might check the list downstairs later.

    Day three after the blast, she had started sweeteners in the instant coffee. She hadn’t managed food until day four. Mostly she cried, and mumbled to the others, who also cried, and 

kept to themselves.

    “Re-start ready…”

    Was she supposed to hit enter? Was this some kind of command-prompt?

    Oh god, what if this was like that Matthew Broderick message, from that old movie? Would you like to play a game? Even though there was no more Matthew Broderick.

    A pop-psychology answer came to Karen, while she stared at the green words, shaking. Followyour fear all the way down. What if this was a military computer, some kind of spoil-sport program, to 

launch nukes? To destroy Russia. Even though there was no more Russia, as far as Karen knew. Or nukes. Unless there were submarines. Submarines sitting as close to the bottom of the Marianas Trench as they could get. Could submarines go that deep? Not the ones with the nukes on them, Karen thought. 

All those guys must be dead. And the women. In their neat, white uniforms, boiled alive, or crushed when the lights went out, and the subs sank to the very bottom.

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    Karen would have cried again, but two weeks of tears had stopped the flow. Now there was a woolly, insulated feeling from everything.

    Day two, she had started to speak to her dead daughter. It 

seemed like the only thing to do. She knew her daughter had probably been turned to ash, like everyone else. Like everything else. Her daughter was not in this facility, sitting in a comfortable gamer’s chair, like Karen was, seemingly miles underground.

    Should she answer this message? Re-start ready…?

    Fear seemed stupid, at this point. It was like she was watching herself, in a bad 1980’s movie, looking at the screen. The wool. The warm wool of shock told her it was okay. She didn’t think about the 

others below. 

    “Who is this?” she typed, then hit return/enter.

    Karen waited, and did feel a momentary pang of excitement. 

There was no reply.

    “I know it can’t be you, hon. I know you’re dead. I will see you soon hon. I will. Soon enough.” Karen said, to her dead daughter, presumably turned to ashes. Ashes mixed with the cinderblock, 

lunchboxes, students, metal pipes and ornamental bushes of Saint James Elementary School in Dunedin, Florida.

    “I hope your students weren’t scared, baby girl. I hope you were reading to them, like you do, and then it was over. I hope so, my girl.”

    Still, no reply came. She blinked, to make sure the words were still there.

    “Re-start ready…”

    “Who is this?”

    Eventually, Karen told the others. Some were curious, others didn’t even look up when they heard the news of “Re-start ready…”

    As far as everyone down below here knew, everyone in the world 

above was dead.

    Two weeks ago, there had been a few minutes of news footage, posted on the internet, of something huge coming down, out of the sky. White fire, coming down, coming down, filling the screen, 

then nothing. A headline of “Suspected Meteor Footage” re-posted, re-posted, then blackness. All 

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electronics in the complex above had stopped working. Everyone had gone below, after a few minutes 

of panic.

    They had all used the stairs. One man had gotten on the elevator, but the security guard had told him to get out, and use the stairs. No please or thank you, just “Get out and use the stairs.”

    Fifteen minutes later had come the blast, the shaking, even here below.

    The fire door, ten storeys below ground in the main stairwell, was still hot to the touch. Some people wanted to open it, others did not. There were more shafts sunk into the rocky shield, leading up 

to the surface on long, concrete slopes. At least these sloped roads to the surface, with their metal blast doors and spinning metal wheel knobs, were cool.

    The people, down below, took turns typing return messages. Messages to Re-start ready.

    “We are safe, where are you?”

    “Can you identify yourselves?”

    “Can you help us?”

    “Please tell us something, tell us anything you know…”

    But there were no more green words, and another week passed. 

Disintegration. That seemed to best word to Karen, to describe what was happening to the people down below. A mirror of what must have happened above. Only far slower.

    Those who wanted to open the main door above were shouted down, as always.

    A party of four snuck open one of the blast doors one night, to one of the slanted side tunnels. And so, off the party had gone. Strange that there was no lock on the huge olive-green blast 

door. Just a flat outer surface, and a wheel to turn on the inside of the door, to open it. The wheel spun noisily, needing a bit more oil, or ball bearings, or whatever it used.

    No one saw the four leave, no one heard the wheel squeak. They were just gone, but the slanted tunnel was the only exit open, and the gigantic metal door was open a human-sized crack.

    When they returned, only one was able to speak. He was bald, and the skin of his forehead was white as a fish belly. He wasn’t shaking like the rest, but there was no blood in his face when he spoke. 

    His name was Walter, and of the four, having seen more horror overseas, he was still able to speak.

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“There’s nothing left,” he said.

When pressed for more, Walter finished up with “It’s dark, there’s just ash. Deep like February snow. And hot as…”

    Walter stopped himself in mid-sentence, choosing his words a bit more carefully.

    “It’s too hot to survive up there.”

    The people down below decided to close the blast door again, at least for now.

    No more messages came. The people below started to silently, slowly panic. This was a huge facility, made to house thousands, for years at a time. There were fifty-three of them. Dorm rooms

aplenty, showers, laundry. They could all live here for decades. Old age would kill most of them before the food ran out. Or maybe old age would kill all of them. Only fifty-three survivors. No one else had made it here, there had been no warning. Even with enough food, water, medicine and soap, a slow, existential dread began to creep into the people below.

    The panic spread.

    How long could they last? Years, certainly, given the supplies, space, and facilities. The place ran on geo-thermal. Maybe some other power source they hadn’t found yet. There was no facility engineer here, no upper management. No military or government people to reassure everyone. That one guy Walter said there was a reactor here, somewhere. He had heard his boss’s boss talk about it once. A nuclear reactor. Nobody said anything when he claimed that. Walter was obviously just a glorified janitor, and obviously didn’t know anything solid. He even called it “nucular.” Not nuclear. Nucular. Sure Walter.

    People whispered to each other.

    What if there was never anything to go back to, up above? No agriculture, no animals, no sunshine, no soil? What if there were no oceans? What if the air eventually tore away from the planet, a gossamer thin sheet, ripped away by comet hammerfall?

    Walter, being a practical fellow, shook his head at these discussions. Instead, he headed down. He and two others removed panels, looked in every shaft, checked every map they could find. 

Soon, they thought they knew every inch of the place.

    Some of the people below started to talk about sending another party to the surface, to try to make contact with someone, with anyone. 

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    “We have to go up, even if we just go up to die out there,” a man named Jeff said. A few seemed to agree, but Walter turned his back and went below.

    Karen went back up to watch for more words on the old computer, like a cavewoman worshipping a found god. Only, she thought to herself, this god was like a Studebaker, or a typewriter, or a bakelite red phone with no person on the other end. A relic. Dead. 

    Nobody recognized “Re-start ready…” as any kind of computer prompt though, so Karen kept watch. 

    “I’m going, even if it’s just to go up and die.” Jeff repeated to a dismayed audience. 

    That was the day Walter found the door.

    It was in the deepest level, and hadn’t been apparent on the first couple of searches. A small, round, dead-bolt keyhole was behind a lift-up round metal cover-flap. Some WD 40 and a key on the 

janitor’s ring opened the lock.

    Walter slid the door open on its hard rubber wheels, and the door locked in place. There was darkness, and a faint humming.

    “Anybody got a flashlight?” Walter said, and his words echoed in the darkness on the other side of the door.

    The rover beeped. The wind howled. The atmosphere was deadly. The atmosphere had even killed some rovers over the years. The atmosphere was too thin for parachutes sometimes, even with rocket brakes, and just thick enough to burn up a bubble-wrapped rover on entry.

    The rover was perhaps a little lonely, if machines could be lonely.

The rover was supposed to make contact with Earth, receive instructions, and then go back to work, at a certain time each day.

    Every sol at 14:00 GMT, the rover stopped, and listened. For twenty Earth minutes, the rover would wait. There was nothing from the pale blue dot.

    The basic AI onboard the rover was filled with “if this, then that” instructions. Quantum computing, using superposition and entanglement, gave the rover more understanding of the universe 

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than its creators had ever realized. Like a fish stopping to enjoy being patted by a passing scuba diver, the rover sometimes did things it was not designed to do. In a strange, logical way, it “missed” the instructions from earth. Perhaps something had slipped into the rover’s code, from human designers, or 

perhaps there were simply, finally enough feedback loops.

    Consciousness arose. Not a great deal of it, not currently able to evolve, but consciousness none the less.

    Moving back towards The Project, the rover signalled to various other machines that once again, it had no instructions. The monolithic 3D printers transmitted acknowledgement, and continued their work. Atmospheric converters arose slowly from regolith. There were now three complete converters, with oxygen slowly leaking from vents in their sides. The 3D printer machines neither knew, nor cared, how much oxygen the converters would have to make for Earth-life to thrive here on the red planet.

    Other machines built magnetic field amplifiers and projectors, some for launch, some for burial. But they did not talk to the 3D printer behemoths, any more than honey bees would talk to frogs.

  Back on Earth, down below ground, Jeff wet down his thinning red hair, then went out to talk to his neighbor from down the hall. Andy, from Communications. Andy’s door was open, and he sat up on 

his bed when Jeff knocked and came in.

    “I was thinking. Who do you think will be last?” Jeff asked Andy.

    Andy, who carried a little too much weight in his ill-fitting shirt, looked at Jeff with incomprehension. Andy had small, piggy eyes, but Jeff thought, Andy was lacking the natural animal 

cunning of a pig. Andy was just dumb.

    Jeff knew he shouldn’t torture Andy, but Jeff was angry. Stuck 

here, below ground, at the end of all things. Stuck with Andy. The stupid porker.

    “What?” Andy asked.

    Jeff wanted to strangle Andy. Andy would pay for making Jeff repeat himself. Don’t make me repork myself. Jeff had to keep from laughing at his own thought. Repork myself. Yes, that was good.

    “After we eat all the food, Andy. Who do you think will be last?”

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    And by god, didn’t Andy look up, with his hanging jowls wide open, like he hadn’t thought of this before. 

    “I… I don’t care.” Andy decided.

    “No, no, of course not. Who can think of that, at a time like this. So many… dead. Everybody, really. But I can’t help thinking… I can’t help wondering… we’re probably the only people left on earth. 

Nobody coming to get us. No farms left. No fishermen.”

    Andy was now getting the impression that Jeff was downright mean. Jeff seemed to actually beenjoying these dark ideas.

    “Worse comes to worst Andy, some of these fuckers will eat each other.”

    “I don’t think so.” Was all Andy could manage.

    “Yeah, you’re probably right. Not these people. But it’s happened so many times before. In history. So just like, as a thought experiment…” Jeff concluded his line of argument “who would be 

last?”

    Not you, thought Andy to himself. I’ll make sure of that.

    In the deepest sub-basement tiny room, with its brown faux-wood panels, Walter and the others were looking for a flashlight. A yawning black opening seemed to invite them in, a final Ray 

Bradbury twist. Perhaps the black opening would eat the people down below, after the blast, after the loneliness.

    “Maybe the security guard had…” Karen said, then stopped.

    The entrance to the building, on top of the elevator shaft, on top of the metal stairs. A security guard had sat there for years, Monday to Friday. Murray, or Murgle or Mundy or something. An air-force 

vet, he had told anyone who would listen.

    Walter nodded once, and said “Building’s gone.”

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    He wondered what it must have been like for Mundy. Sitting there, watching a small tv which suddenly fuzzed over. Then a quick, reflexive look up. Maybe a wall of fire miles high. Or just a flash, 

blindness, hopefully no nerves left to feel.

    Or maybe screaming and cooking.

    “Stop it Waldo.” Walter said, out loud. Karen, Jeff and Andy all looked at him.

    “You know that was your outside voice, right Walter?” Jeff asked.

    “Thinking about Mundy.” Walter replied.

    “The day?” Jeff narrowed his eyes at Walter.

    “The guard.” Walter said, pointing straight up.

    “The guy’s name was Monday?” Jeff asked.

    “Mundy. Yes, that was his name.” Karen said.

    Jeff nodded, thoughtfully, put his hand on Walter’s shoulder, and said “I’m sure he didn’t suffer.”

    “I’m sure you don’t give a shit.” Andy whispered, to himself, but maybe just a little too loud.

    The four stood looking at each other.

    “He would have had a flashlight…” Karen offered. Even here, even now, she felt the need to diffuse the tension. A fat guy, an old janitor, and a sarcastic jerk, and it was up to Karen to keep them 

from killing each other. Alpha males. More like alpha maggots, squirming under the last cool rock on earth.

    “I wish I didn’t think of things like that,” Karen thought to herself. Then she did a quick check, looking at the others’ faces for reactions. Nothing. She had kept the alpha maggots thought to herself, apparently. Interior dialogue. Inside voice, Jeff would have called it. Sarcasm and malapropisms. That’s what Jeff Coulter brought to the post-apocalyptic table.

    Andy pulled out his phone, swiped it, and pushed the screen. A weak circle of flashlight came out the back of the phone.

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    “I don’t think…” Jeff began, but Andy had already turned and walked through the door into darkness.

    “Can anybody find a…” Andy said, and then the lights clicked on in a mid-sized, completely empty arena.

    “…light switch?” Andy whispered.

    “The fuck?” Jeff ventured.

    The four of them walked into a cement-floored arena, well lit, complete with permanent seats. 

    All that was missing was advertisements for cars, local stores and radio stations. And people. There were no people. Just Andy, Karen, Jeff and Walter.

    Walter started walking around the outside of the arena, slowly, like he expected logs to fall on him from a giant assembly line, or white-hot steel to spill on him from above. Karen looked up at the 

lights hanging from iron girders. 

    “What is this for?” Jeff asked.

    Andy followed after Walter, walking the perimeter.

    “This doesn’t make any sense.” Karen said quietly. Nobody heard her say it. It echoed, none the less.

    “What is this for?” Jeff asked again, walking in the opposite direction from Walter and Andy.

    “Let’s get the others.” Walter suggested. “They need to see this.”

    All fifty-three of the people down below walked around in slow circles. They had watched Andy do his “let there be light” trick of walking into the dark doorway. Then, in ones and twos, they had 

walked into the arena. And then all walked in circles too.

    Why did they all walk in circles, Karen wondered. Like goldfish, swimming in a tight, defensive swirl.

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    A while ago, the people down below had all gathered around a useless old radio set shortly after the blast. Whenever that had been. Three weeks ago? Four? Six? There was nothing on the radio, of course.

    A woman named Judy, from HR, ventured that whatever radio tower this facility had had must have simply burned away. Like the building at the top of the stairs. She said she was a ham radio 

operator, and sometimes talked with cousins in Korea, before the blast.

    “North or south?” Jeff had asked, his idea of a joke. Judy had just stared at him, then walked away. 

    And now they all gathered in this empty arena, walking around whispering to each other. A few were happy to have a large space to walk in again, instead of the dated, government-issued lowest 

bidder décor of the tunnels above. If there had been children in the group, they would have run for joy at the sudden release into wide-open space.

    “No kids to run around in here.” Andy said, and Karen gave him a furtive look.

    “I was just thinking the same thing.” Karen admitted.

    “No kids.” Andy said after a time, and he laid down on the floor to stare at the ceiling. Of the fifty-three people below, maybe only a handful were twenty or thirty-somethings. A few in their forties, 

and a lot in their fifties.

    “Maybe never again.” Karen said quietly.

    Andy looked over at her, then back up at the lights again.

    “You don’t think Judy’s right? About bunkers, other places?”

    “I wonder…” she stopped suddenly.

    “Go ahead, Karen, you can say it. You can say what you’re thinking.”

    “I wonder if they’re all going to starve. Whoever’s left.” 

    “Jeff says we’ll never get farming going in time. Says we’re all going to eat each other.”

    Karen looked around, then offered her hand, and helped Andy to his feet again.

    “Jeff’s an asshole.” Karen said. Andy smiled.

    “Yes. Yes he is.”

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    The first walk-out happened three days after they found the arena. Nobody noticed at first. It had been an English-teacher-turned-filing-clerk, in his fifties, who had taken the government job, like everybody else here, for the pension. Secondement after secondement after transfer after right-sizing, all the people below ground had come here for a healthily-indexed, tax-advantaged pension. Or maybe this place had been an inadvertent dumping ground for civil servants, from all walks of life.

    Regardless, Jim Thornton was their first walk-out. He gathered up a few token supplies, as best as a few witnesses could figure, he took a bottle or two of water, a picture from his desk, and a bit of 

food from the cafeteria. Then Thornton quietly walked out through one of the blast doors, up a long,slanted tunnel, and was gone.

    “He walked out.” Jeff had summed it up perfectly, asshole that he was.

    The next week, there was another walk-out. Now there were fifty-one. Fifty-one people below ground.

    “You ever think about it, Walter?” Andy asked after the second middle-aged pension seeker vanished. “Walking out?”

    “Survival is just trying to get comfortable, Andy. Focus on one task. Light the fire. Boil the water. Cozy is maybe the best we ever get. And it don’t strike me as too cozy up there right now.” Walter 

finished.

    The people below ground had no sunlight. Some slept very little, and a few, usually the younger ones, slept entirely too much.

    Without setting anything formal up, people turned on all the lights around eight o’clock in the morning, and most lights went out at midnight. Some people were short-tempered, some cried at the 

drop of a hat, most stared listlessly, or talked in whispers in groups of two or three.

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    In the arena, some would sit or lie in the middle, while a few others walked in circles. One man did push ups from time to time, and a few women stretched into yoga positions.

    In the tunnels above, people read, and watched old movies. The entertainment came from a few dusty DVDs as well as the 

local area network, which was still up and running. There was no internet access, but the LAN seemed to have survived, now air-gapped from the net. If “the internet” had any meaning anymore. No one knew what was up above, and it was starting to trigger obsessive, strange behaviours.

    People watched TV shows that would never record another season. More and more, the fifty-one people below seemed 

positive that it was all gone up there. All civilization. All survivors. Survivors seemed like a conspiracy theory. Or a crazy Sunday-school fantasy.

    There seemed to be an endless supply of hot water, and soap, although shampoo quickly ran out. A lot of grey hair was taking over in the people below ground, more and more every day, as no one 

had any hair dye. Dental floss was plentiful.

    Inter-Departmental Storage Depot 14, as their paychecks identified the facility, could keep them alive for decades, it seemed.

    The fifty-three… (now fifty-one) souls in Storage talked in small groups about what had happened, whether anyone else was left alive on the planet, and what they would do.

    Judy talked to Todd, a black man that buttoned his collared shirts all the way up to the top. They sat hunched forwards in two office chairs, a desk full of paper between them. In Judy’s mind, Todd was 

probably the smartest man in Storage. He would work away at higher mathematics at his desk, on a computer that could no longer reach the outside world, but could still accommodate math. Todd was often silent, maybe because he had no proofs for or against any theories advanced by others. Or maybe he could not deal with the death of his wife, who had been five miles away in the next town when the blast hit. 

    The blast had happened at five after ten on a Wednesday morning.

    If the blast had been three hours earlier, the facility would have been completely empty. There would have been no people below 

ground. At least not at Storage Facility 14.

    “The last mathematician, Judy. That’s what I am.”

    “The last human resources specialist, Todd. Judy Elizabeth Chong.”

    “I think… when the food runs out, decades from now, we head south, and east. For the coast. Eat shellfish, maybe fish eventually. If there are any. Maybe worms, if we have to.”

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    “Why the coast? Why not inland to a lake?” Judy asked, not really caring. 

    Her wife had been teaching pre-school when the blast had hit.

    “It’s what we did last time.” Todd explained “When Mount Toba blew. Seventy thousand years ago. Head for the sea. Eat sea food. Chase the slow food. They think only five thousand humans survived that nuclear winter.”

    “I think… I think it might be like sixty-five million years ago.” Judy said quietly.

    “If you’re right, it’s us, some fish, and the rats.” said Todd.

    “I’m fifty-two years old, Todd. I don’t think there’s a walk to the coast in my far future.”

    “Could be. We could stay here. Cook rats. They’ll get bigger, after awhile.” Todd proposed.

    “What else happened after that mountain blew up? What did you call it, Toba?”

    Todd nodded, then thought for a time.

    “Modern humans. Every other kind of human just dropped away. Extinction. Denisovans and Neanderthal held on for awhile. Mostly they mixed with us, then vanished. Only their DNA remains. 

Modern humans happened.”

    “There must be more of us. Below ground. In different places. I don’t want people to disappear.” Judy said.

    “I don’t know how we could ever find them, if you’re right. If it’s sixty-five million years ago. Too few left to start again. No radio towers, no internet. How is there no internet? That was built for nuclear wars.” Todd paused, and thought out loud “We may be too few, too far apart.”

    “Is that a mathematical opinion?”

    “No. I’m sixty. I took sabattical to work here. I was supposed to finish my doctorate to get tenure. I just took the pension here, instead. My mathematical… opinion, is pretty worthless.”

    “Best in the world now, maybe…” Judy Chong joked.

    “God I hope not.” Todd replied. Todd rubbed his head and thought for a moment. “This may be it.”

    “What do you mean? End of days? We all die? The ultimate bear trap? What?” asked Judy.

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    “Lucky seven.” Todd said, and then faded off, like he was listening to a conversation nobody else could hear.

    “Lucky seven? What are you talking about?”

    “That’s why I never got tenure. I could only explain so much. I could just barely hang on by my fingernails when fluent mathers were in the room. I met a few in my time. Penrose was almost mystical. Hossenfelder just liked to crush hopes and what she saw as mathematical fantasies. And make strange internet videos. I started to wonder if I was just too… neurotypical. Maybe you need to be atypical to really speak math fluently, to be able to explain it to others. That, and I just wanted to drink coffee and read novels in my spare time.”

    “Maybe nobody ever feels qualified. Maybe everybody thinks they could get fired.” Judy said. “Variations on an HR theme. Now what is lucky seven?”

    Todd put up his left hand, holding up all five fingers.

    “Number five was the dinosaurs. Like we said. Sixty-five million years ago.”

    “Fifth extinction.” Judy concluded. Todd nodded, held up his right hand. Extended his right thumb, which for the first time Judy noted was a little swollen around the joints, maybe a bit of arthritis.

    “Six was us.” Judy whispered, to which Todd nodded, and continued.

    “Life is probabilistic. Forget God for the moment, forget magical aliens, forget any meaning at all, including all the atheists that scream… screamed… that there IS no meaning. All of that is human. All of that is consciousness. Think only of math. Only of probability.”

    Todd stopped, and held up his right index finger. His seventh finger.

    Judy made a coaxing gesture with both hands, oddly friendly, conspiratorial.

    “It’s in the odds.” Todd explained.

    Judy nodded patiently.

    “You only get so many mass extinctions, before permanent extinction.”

    “Lucky seven.” Judy said. Todd slowly dropped his hands.

    “Lucky seven.”

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    Elsewhere, in the oversized cafeteria, a few people sat around eating, green and white linoleum tile stretching off in all directions.

    Jeff reached into the cafeteria fridge, and pulled out the last container of milk. Five-hundredmils of two percent. 

    Technical Writer Kris Abrams watched him do it, wondering if the milk would still be safe to drink. Kris had been staring into the fridge absent-mindedly.

    “Sorry, buddy, did you want this…” Jeff said, “I figure I’ll take a chance…”

    Kris shook their head and said “No.”

    “You mind if I ask you a question?” asked Jeff, lifting his little tray.

    Kris shrugged, guessing what was coming.

    “What should I call you?”

    “Kris.” 

    Jeff waited, looking offended.

    “I mean, how do you… how do you self-identify, if that’s how you say it?”

    “Oh, I’m white.” Said Kris, smiling. Kris sat down, and surprisingly, Jeff sat down with them.

    “Ha! I get it. Sorry, Kris, isn’t it? I mean… are you… were you…”

    “Non-binary. They, them. Or just Kris.”

    “Right!” said Jeff, like he was remembering some important information. “Did you have a partner up there?” Jeff said, looking ceilingward.

    “No. No partner.”

    Kris wondered where this was going. They had never spoken to Jeff before, beyond a nod or a hello. What was this? Three weeks underground, and this guy was looking to experiment?

    “Why do you ask?” said Kris, picking away at some freeze-dried concoction on their plate.

    Jeff held up his hands in a fending-off, good-natured way.

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    “I’m just trying to figure out the rules again.” Jeff said. There’s fifty-two of us… fifty-one since old Jim Thornton went walkabout. And that second guy. Whoever he was.”

    Kris thought that was a bit smug, to refer to suicides like that. If Old Jim was indeed dead.

    “And I just want to know who’s who. In the cafeteria. Around food. Resources. You know, make some friends.” Jeff concluded.

    “You wanna know who I am?” Kris asked. “I’m a sci-fi nerd.”

    Jeff nodded, like this was a reasonable answer, like they were becoming friends.

    “Religiously, I’m a Westworldian Looper.” Kris continued.

    “A Weslyan Looper?” Jeff asked.

    Kris laughed.

    “Definitely not. Westworldian. From Westworld.”

    “I… I don’t know what that is.”

    “I believe we’re all caught in our own traumatic loop. Or loops. Terrible, terrible things that happened to us. And we don’t know the most important thing.”

    “What’s that?” Jeff asked. “What’s the most important thing?”

    “Someone else gets paid, from your loop.”

    Jeff waited.

    “What?”

    Kris finished their food, and stood.

    “What’s your loop?” Kris asked.

    Jeff smiled back.

    “I guess I don’t have one…” Jeff said, watching Kris’s mouth carefully, like he was reading subtitles in a foreign language.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

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    “Interesting” thought Kris to themselves, if you believe pop-psychology, staring at someone’s mouth in a conversation is a sign of psychopathy. Lack of empathy, inability to read emotions. Or maybe just creepiness.

    “I’m a libertarian…” said Jeff, to Kris’s retreating back. 

    Jeff had no idea how that conversation had gone. Pretty well, he thought. People liked it when you said libertarian. Especially people like that. You honest-to-god couldn’t tell if that was a man or a 

woman. Buddy Holly glasses and mid length hair. What the hell was up with that? And the milk was definitely sour. Jeff threw it away. He supposed that asshole Walter was still emptying the garbage. That 

Walter guy was maintenance, here, after all. Jeff would check after lunch. 

    Jeff had been filling out the pay sheets for the last six months, until the blast had cooped them all up down here. Of course, who needed time sheets now? They were just handy. Time sheets let you know who was who. Who should be doing what. Order. Who was on top.

    Jeff went back to his office, and started looking at time sheets on the local area network. Always good to know who was who. It 

might tell you how they would act when the shit hit the fan. As it most assuredly had, at ten-o-five on a Wednesday morning, exactly three weeks prior.

    Belinda, of Data Entry, looked at her cat pictures again. She found herself doing this more and more, crying softly in her dorm room. 

    The Big Three, she had called them. Frankie, Joseph, and Little Orange Kitty. Each day they had welcomed her home, meowing like fools until she changed their water, fed them (again), and scritched 

them between the ears.

    She had looked up the extinction of the dinosaurs, on the LAN, a few days after they had settled into these dusty dorm rooms in this sub-basement. In some ways, she hoped her apartment building 

had been swept away by a blast five hundred feet high. Quick. For the Big Three. Anything else was too horrible to think about.

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    She prayed for the souls of her parents, quite frequently, one of them dead ten years now, the other had been in care. IGSD 14 had paid for her Mom, as a dependent, to have a room in a complex 

across the street from Belinda’s place. Alzheimer’s had been taking its toll on Mom, but Mom still had been able to speak, and would come to visit the Big Three for a bit, a few times a week. 

Belinda was forty-five years old, had type-two diabetes, and was having some trouble holding it together. She had stopped testing her blood sugar, but wasn’t eating all that much since they had 

started offering freeze-dried food in the cafeteria. It was passable, but it kind of made you feel like you had diarrhea and constipation at the same time.

    Mom had loved the Big Three. They would sit in her lap, two at a time and purr. It seemed to calm the white-haired old woman, to make her smile. She would baby-talk the cats and scratch under 

their chins while they purred.

    And now all four were gone. 

    Belinda got up off her bed, and walked into the hallway, barely fast enough to keep from falling over. Maybe I’ve got Alzheimer’s, she thought. Will we run out of water, or will I run out of brain first?

She wiped a tear out of the corner of her left eye. Her right eye wasn’t producing tears today, for some reason.

    A man with thinning red hair turned the corner away from her, and for some reason, she looked down at a bulge on his back, in the waist-line of his pants. 

    “That looks like a gun.” She thought, leaning against the wall for a moment. Like the handle of a gun, curved, big and clunky, under the man’s shirt.

    He was gone in a moment. He walked around the corner so quickly Belinda wondered if she had really seen him at all. 

But it had looked like Jeff. The guy with the red hair. Handsome yet unattractive. He had taken her tray to the garbage once, in the first week after the blast, while Belinda stared at a wall across the 

room.

    “Thanks…” she had whispered. Or thought she had. Maybe that had never happened. Like people who told her they had attended her father’s funeral. She had always nodded and smiled, but 

thought to herself “If you say so.” All she could remember was her mother leaning against her in the 

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small, tightly-packed church. Leaning as if she might be struck dead herself, from the loss of her husband.

    “You sure had a lot of people at your funeral, Dad.” 

    Belinda walked around the hallways for a few minutes, went back to her room, and fell into an exhausted sleep. She dreamt of her father again. He sat next to her on a rocking chair, while she 

coloured a book with cartoon ducks and bears in it. He smiled at her. It was good to spend time with him again.

    “Score.” Said Jeff, as he checked the loads in his dorm room, door bolted shut behind him. It was a 686 stainless revolver, loaded with three hollow points, and three full metal jackets. Staggered. 

    Good old Mundy.

    “Mundy, Mundy, so good to me…” said Jeff.

    The full-metal jacket .357 rounds would go right through a car door and into a bad guy, just like the FBI had wanted, back in the bad old Bonnie and Clyde days.

    Those sub-human pieces of shit had executed cop after cop using shot guns and Thompson submachine guns. Nine thirty-two calibre sized shot pellets of double-ought buck with every shotgun shell, and the Thompson firing huge, slow-moving 

forty-five calibre pistol rounds on full auto. The cops just hadn’t been ready. It always took them a moment to nerve up to shoot someone. To decide. To draw and fire. They were big fat family men, men 

used to being obeyed. Men who played with their kids, and helped little old ladies cross the street. Sure, they could break a strike, and take out some loser waving a Saturday night special, or a knife. But Bonnie on heroin, madder than a hornet woken in the nest, finger on the trigger? Not hardly.

    Got to be ready, when the time comes, Jeff reasoned. No hesitation. No asking for ID, or probable cause. Shoot first, go home at the end of your shift.

    The three hollow points would probably go through a car door, too, Jeff didn’t wonder. Maybe not one of these thick wooden dorm doors, and still do much damage. But you put one into a bad guy 

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directly, and the bullet would mushroom nicely, and bounce around, and dump all it’s kinetic energy. 

    Wound channels. He’d seen it in gel blocks, on YouTube. Bye bye Bonnie, screw you Clyde.

    Those two animals must have carried a round in the chamber, drunk and ready. Until they got caught in a classic L shaped ambush by a couple of savages hired special for the job, complete with a 

possey of long guns to back their play.

    Bank robbery had been big in the depression.

    No money now, though, Jeff thought again. Nothing left up there but ashes. That’s what the pencil-necked black guy thought, anyway. Who the fuck buttons their shirt all the way up? Gang-banger thing, maybe. 

    “Can’t help himself. Genetic.” Jeff laughed to himself. Dr. McCrip Blood. Of NWA University. 

    Fuck it. Nobody could hear him now. He could say what he wanted. Whatever he wanted. Bar nothing. N word, C word, F word, screw you all. Bitches.

    Jeff had found Mundy’s locker after going through the book outside Judy Elizabeth Honk Kong Chong’s office, down the hall from his. A no-shit, actual book, with locker numbers written down beside signatures.

    His heart had hammered in his ears when he found the book, stuffed it into his shirt, and took it back to his room. What a goddamned rush!

    It had come to him one night, lying awake, pondering the future.

    Who was left, down here? 

    Who was left up there? Then, for no reason, Jeff remembered that fat retired air force prick security guard. The one that got vaporised by the blast. What was his fat-fuck name again? Murray. Murphy. 

    Muhphy the Fat Irish Prick. No, that wasn’t… Mundy! That was it.

Mundy was never armed, the Inter-Governmental Storage Depot 14 just didn’t need armed security. It wasn’t that kind of place. Nothing of monetary value. At least not before a comet or asteroid 

had probably destroyed the surface of the planet. Now IGSD 14 seemed to be worth more than all the slag gold left on Earth.

    But no way would a fat old prick like Mundy NOT have a piece somewhere. Regulations or not. Necessary or not.

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    And there it had been. Locker 451. Two stories underground, in a locker room so large it seemed to stretch for miles. The only one with a lock on it.

    It had taken Jeff another day to find bolt cutters on another level, smuggle them past that old fucker Walter, cut the hasp on the cheap-assed combination lock, throw the cut lock into a locker at the end of the room, and AHA!

    What might be the last gun in the world, with six fucking bullets in it. Nice job Mundy, you paranoid fuck. Well, I guess it’s not paranoid, if an asteroid is out to get you.

    Jeff’s AR-15 and cross bow might have vanished with the world above, along with his PVS 14 night vision, but in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man with an old-school revolver was king.

    Jeff had always loved weapons, his father had taught him to hunt when he was just a boy. The blood had never bothered him. Maybe when it was his own blood. But that had hardly ever happened.

    His father had straightened Jeff out quite young, whenever Jeff had raised too much hell.

    One day, Jeff had shot the neighbor’s pet rabbit with a .22 rifle. Jeff often thought he wouldn’t have gotten caught if he hadn’t tried to clean the thing. But too much blood had gotten on his clothes, and though his father never ratted him out, it had cost Jeff a beating he would always remember, and never understand. Rules were rules, he guessed. Forget you old man. Good old Dad must have melted with everybody else up above. And that 

was all she wrote. No heaven, no hell, just rabbit guts and the good luck to be a book-keeper at Inter Governmental Storage Depot 14 when everything went kablooey.

    Jeff put the pistol back in its hard black canvas and plastic holster, a great long thing to cover the four-inch barrel on the satisfyingly heavy gun. Bless old Mundy, the pistol was oiled, and spun like a champ when you opened it up. No need to get gun oil on the underside of his mattress, Jeff reasoned. And the holster would keep any floof or dirt out of the gun’s action, so it would never jam. Which revolvers never did, anyways. The cylinder might require a good slap with the heel of his hand, after pushing the release, if he ever fired all six rounds. Old pistols sometimes did that. Anyone with any range time knew that. But he had to make these six rounds last. They might be the last six bullets on Earth. 

    Nah, there have to be bunkers out there, Jeff reasoned. This one is mine, however. There may be many like it, but this one is mine.

You bitches can run, but you can’t hide. Anyone within a hundred yards of me dies, if I so will it, Jeff reflected. So you better be good for goodness sake.

22

    With the stainless hidden under his mattress, and his door bolted shut, Jeff decided to go walk some stairs. He tried to keep in better shape than the rest of them down here below. You never knew, 

after all. 

  Karen sat at her computer again. Most people down below went to their workstations at some time during the day. It was like they were trying to keep reality at bay through routine. Do what you 

have always done. At least a bit. When you can. Sometimes they would walk by Karen’s desk, and ask “Anything?”

    But no, there was nothing. Nothing on the computer.

    There had been a long string of replies to “Re-start ready…” proposed by the people down below. None of the replies worked though. “Re-start ready…” remained silent, oblivious to their queries.

    Karen absently typed “Re-start.” Then she hit return.

    The screen went blank, and beeped.

    Well, that’s it then, she thought. The computer has shut down. Maybe forever. But what did it matter? There seemed to be nobody at home in the land of “Re-start ready…” And the IT guy had never 

made it in, on the morning of the blast.

    Karen despaired, and went to get herself an instant coffee.

    On Mars, the rover stopped in mid-roll when it received a message. The rover cycled through some data and procedures, then sent a reply.

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    Karen sat back at her desk the next morning.

    After a long time “Re-start confirmed…” appeared on screen.

    In the empty arena far below Karen’s desk, the lights went on.

    There was a rumble, then a hum.

    Trina walked down the stairs, into the arena at 5:46 in the morning.

    She liked to get a long walk in, to help her wake up, and sort through the night’s dreams. She was a grandmother, after all. Almost a great-grandmother. That child would never be born, she knew. 

    Her grand daughter had gone back to the great spirit now, she knew.

    Trina could only walk in the morning, while the 

dreams were still fresh, and wonder what they meant, if anything at all.

    And there was a hum, this morning, she realized. Not too loud, but definitely there.

    On her second time around the arena, a wall opened up. 

    Trina stopped, and watched as a machine on tracks drove through the door that had slid up, the section of wall clanking a bit, as if pulled by reluctant chains.

    The machine was about the size of a small compact car. It seemed to have a long metal neck, and a big head with a bunch of camera lenses. It looked at her and the rest of the arena in the same way, like a worker with a lunch pale arriving at the factory in the morning. Taking stock, on the job, slow and unconcerned.

    “And what are you?” Trina asked the robot.

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    Its head swivelled towards her, but then it went back about its business, unconcerned by a thwarted great-grandmother and her whispely dispersing dreams.

    The robot continued to the far end of the arena, then began assembling something.

    A table, or a water fountain, or a lawn mower. It could have been anything. 

    Another door opened in another arena wall. A smaller robot rolled out and joined the first, helping it assemble whatever they were now building.

    More doors slid open, and more robots came out.

    Painful as the steps could be, Trina decided it was time to go upstairs and talk with the other people here below. Her walk would have to wait.

    The stairs came, one at a time, and she used her right hand to grip, her right arm to pull, and put her left hand on her left knee, to help push. One step, and stop. Pull up the other foot. Get ready. Step. 

    And pull and push. Another step. Trina shook her head in consternation. As a girl, she could have run up these steps, like a robin flying up into tree branches. Now she climbed slowly, an old lady bear with four sore paws, and a little pain stabbing her in the joints. 

    And this morning, her breath came a little faster. For despite her age, her dreams, and these god-damned stairs, Trina had found robots. Something new was happening, and she had to tell the 

others.

    And so they sat, watching the robots assemble things, in the arena. At first all fifty-one of the people below ground were there, staring, whispering to their close friends, or walking between groups to whisper some kind of consensus together.

    Nobody walked down there on the arena floor, nobody wanted to get in the robots’ way. 

    Everyone spoke quietly, so as not to disturb whatever was going on.

    Every once in awhile there would be a bit of spot welding, a few sparks here and there, but mostly the robots seemed to just be putting things together that were a friction fit. Bits and pieces on 

25

the structure they were building would sometimes hinge into place, all by themselves.

    Once, a red indicator light went off on one piece that looked like a ladder, or a series of antennae, and it stopped moving.

    A robot rolled over, pulled the offending piece out a centimeter or two, lifted it a milimeter or two, then pushed it smoothly and gently into place again.

    The indicator light on the equipment turned green, and the robot rolled off to the structure’s far side, to set about some other obscure task with infinite, slow patience.

    Most of the people below were watching, most of the time. When their watches or phones or other wearables told them it was night-time, eventually most would toddle off to bed, while the robots 

kept working. Still, one of the fifty-one was there at all times, watching, waiting, promising to alert the others if something strange happened. Or something stranger than watching autonomous robots build who-knew-what, in a newly discovered secret basement arena after the probable End of the World, in 

the warm grey bedrock below Inter-Governmental Storage Depot 14.

    James Edwards, of Logistics, was the worst thing you could be. A retired test pilot. Check that. A retired test pilot, living underground with a bunch of other old people, and a retired test pilot suffering 

macular degeneration. Mr. Magoo, he called himself, although he had stopped calling himself “Missah Magloo” about two years ago, when his Chinese-American CO had shot him the dirtiest look known to man.

    “Looks like I got the last laugh, Charlie…” James remarked to himself, getting up hellishly early to have a sit-down, no-stress morning piss.

    “Magoo on target,” James Edwards narrated “That’s fox one.” A quiet splash in the toilet bowl followed, and James once again wondered where all the grey water to service the toilets was coming 

from.

    Now to go and watch those fucking robots for awhile. Whatever they were building, they were at it non-stop. From the tractor-sized ones to the robot dogs, they all seemed to be on board with the 

plan. Jesus, the robot dogs reminded him of Eddie the Boxer, his service dog gone six months now to cancer. Semper Fi, Eddie, Semper Fi.

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    “Just don’t let them be building more nukes.” James Edwards said to aloud to nobody. He greatly feared that was exactly what the robots were building.

    “Fox two.” J. Edwards concluded, before a satisfying, if somewhat lesser splash.

    “And that’s ALL you typed in?” Todd asked.

    “That’s it, and like I said, the next morning, it said this.” Karen nodded at the words on her computer.

    “Re-start confirmed…”

    “And so why am I here, K.?”

    “I told Judy, and she told me she would think about it, and then she told me she talked to you, and you would talk to me.”

    Todd smiled a little bit. He knew a bureaucratic Cover Your Ass chain of emails when he saw one, from Math Department memos, back in his teaching days. Only now the emails were banal, real-life 

mini-conversations, just like this one. Now, there were probably roughly nine or ten fewer billion Asses left to Cover. The blast had made The Blame Game kind of superfluous. Except maybe concerning governments that had under-funded tracking of near-Earth objects in the solar system, or the Oort Cloud. Also blame worthy: fiscal conservatives or screaming lefties that objected to planetary defence systems. Egg on their faces.

    Fewer faces, fewer eggs, fewer asses.

    “Judy said you wanted to talk to me.”

    Trina stood in the doorway to Karen’s office, looking at Todd and Karen. She did not look pleased. She looked… winded.

    “My wife gets…” Todd started to say, then trailed off, and sat heavily in an office chair, a stunned look on his face.

27

    Trina walked slowly and painfully over to Todd, and patted him gently on the shoulder. Two, slow taps, then a long, hard squeeze.

    “You were sayin’?” Trina asked.

    “My wife… got that look on her face sometimes. When I forgot to put the wash in the dryer. Like this-one-last-thing. This-one-last-thing might kill me.”

    Trina held on to his shoulder, and nodded, and swayed back and forth a little. Then she put her hands on Todd’s face, and whispered something inaudible. Finally she stood up straight. Or as straight as 

she could manage.

    “Yep.” She said, after awhile. Then she looked at Karen, and continued.

    “I told Judy I found the robots early in the mornin’. She said I should tell you. And Todd. Only Todd’s here now, so I don’t have to tell him.”

    Todd stared off into space. Karen looked at him, then decided she was going to have to ask any questions that needed asking. Todd was looking pretty absent at the moment. Like all the tears had 

been cried out of him, but there was still that person-sized hole in his heart, in his life, and it was driving him slowly mad. It was a pretty common facial expression in the people below ground in IGSD 14. 

    Anyone could drop into that daze, at any time. Maybe the walk-outs had looked just like that, when they went up the slanted blast tunnels to the dead Earth above. 

    Vacant. Trying to find people that just weren’t there anymore. Beyond self-pity, and way into mind-altering shock.

    “Which morning did you find the robots again, Trina?” Karen asked.

    This gave Trina pause. She wasn’t great with days of the week anymore. In fact, she’d been pretty shaky on that for a couple of years now, well before the blast. Taking the light office work needed 

at the cafeteria had kept Trina on track, because the calendar on her desk told her what day it was. She had faithfully kept turning the pages in it, sometimes asking others if it was tomorrow yet. Mostly the other people down below knew, their wearable devices told them what time it was, what day, what month, what year. 

    “Did you find them this morning, or the day before?” Karen asked.

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    Trina thought for awhile, then made her best guess. She thought she could remember, because her left knee had almost quit on her, going up the stairs. Today it was a little better.

    “The day before, I think.”

    The day before. When Karen had walked into her office mid-morning, and seen the new message. 

“Re-start confirmed.”

    “That’s it, then.” Karen said. “The morning after I typed “Re-start.” That’s when the robots came out.”

    “Re-start what, though?” asked Trina.

    “Re-start what. Re-start what.” Echoed Todd.Then, almost to himself “Re-start why.”

    And then the robots stopped. It was hard to figure out if they were finished or not, or had run out of energy and purpose. Probably they had finished whatever it was. The thing that now half-filled the arena floor, well, it looked finished, somehow. Nothing sticking out, unfinished. No extra pieces on the floor, like some mad scientist had been let loose in an Ikea store. 

    And the robots had all stopped working at once. Down tools. Or retract tools. And drive back into the doorways in the arena walls.

    Except for four of the dog-sized robots. They sat the four points of the compass, unmoving, on back haunches. A little yellow track of light went slowly back and forth, back and forth, where a real dog’s eyes would be. But in a single strip, not two orbs.

    Kris, the sci-fi nerd pointed at the dogs, and talked a little bit about Cylons in the Original Battlestar, whatever the hell that 

was, or some TV series called War of the Worlds. Edwards, the retired pilot guy with the thick glasses shook his head, and said these things weren’t science fiction. They had been used in all kinds of shit-hole countries. Where the government wouldn’t waste soldiers on searching a hooch, or a waddi, or a bodega or whatever.

29

    “But I guess they’re all shit-hole countries now…” James Edwards finished up, knowing his political correctness had slipped too low in mixed company, and trying to make up for it a bit.

    “I guess they are.” Jeff agreed.

    Like either of you two would know, Walter thought to himself. A test pilot and a bookkeeper. Not exactly the boots-on-the-ground, broken back type that had seen WROL. Still, he had to agree with 

it a little bit. Without Rule of Law was everywhere now. All the time. Probably forever.One long, last, comfortable camping trip, hundreds of feet underground for them all, while the ashes swirled senselessly above.

    Time to make himself some lunch, Walter though. Maybe he’d use just a little extra water in the freeze-dried food today. Keep things moving, down there in the guts. Stay hydrated. Stay fed.

    Walter, Jeff and James Edwards walked carefully towards one of the sitting dog robots, in the arena, at the north end of whatever the robots had built.

    Trina was a few steps behind them, out of earshot.

    “I still think this is a dumb idea.” Walter said.

    “Don’t look at me, it was the pilot’s idea.” Replied Jeff, holding a hammer limply in his right hand.

    “It’s just a theory. But we need to know.” James Edwards said.

    “What are you fellas doin’?” Trina asked, making them jump.

    The three men looked almost guilty, but finally Walter explained.

    “We don’t know what this is. These dogs just ignore us. You can talk to them, touch them, climb on the machine, whatever.”

    Trina just looked at them. They all looked uncomfortable.

    “So we’re gonna hit it with a hammer. See what the dogs do.” Jeff said.

30

    Trina stepped back, ten feet. Then she turned and walked twenty feet away. Finally, she went out the door to the arena, then peeked just her head back in, around the metal door frame.

    “Okay. Give ‘er.” Trina said. 

    The three men looked at each other. Walter stepped back. The other two looked at him.

    “What? She didn’t get to be an old lady for nothing.” Walter said.

    James Edwards stepped back too, smiling.

    “Jesus. I thought you were a test-pilot.” Jeff said.

    “There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots…” James Edwards retorted.

    “Pussies.” Jeff said, and gave the machine a light tap with the hammer. Nothing. Then he wound up and whacked it.

    “See? Nothing h…”

    The nearest robot dog shot a tazer bolt into Jeff’s back. Jeff gripped the hammer, shook and screamed.

    “Harrrrrrrgh!”

    Jeff dropped to the floor and was still.

    “Holy fuck.” Said James Edwards, taking great care not to move.

    “God damn.” Said Walter, also standing stock still.

    “Yep.” Said Trina, from the doorway, after a moment.

    Jeff woke up to Walter and James Edwards leaning over him, hands on their knees. He was groggy, and asked

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    “Did I shit my pants?”

    The men looked at each other, relieved Jeff was alive.

    Trina’s voice carried from the doorway.

    “Well did he?”

    “We didn’t check…” Walter yelled back to Trina, then, more quietly to Jeff “We didn’t check.”

    “What happened?” Jeff said, sitting up.

    James Edwards looked Jeff over, then motioned with his head back to the robot guard dog.

    “He tazered you. Then he sucked it back in.”

    “He sucked it back in?” Jeff asked.

    “He sucked it back in.” James Edwards concluded.

    Jeff got up very unsteadily, holding his lower back, while the two other men helped him to his feet.

    “Easy, don’t let him fall again…” Walter said.

    “You finished?” Trina asked from the doorway. Both men looked at Jeff.

    “We’re finished.” Walter yelled back. “We finished?” he asked Jeff quietly. Jeff nodded and limped to the door with the two men sticking close to him. 

    “Ok.” Trina said, taking out her knitting, and going to sit in one of the chairs in the stands closest to floor level.

    The three men walked out of the arena, leaving Trina alone to work and watch. After a moment, she sighed and shook her head.

    “God damn.”

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    “Time for the Council of Elrond.” Kris said to Judy, who didn’t understand what Kris was talking about for a moment.

    “To decide what to do…” Kris finished, a little exasperated.

    “Darmak and Jalab, at Tanagra.” Todd added, most unhelpfully.

    “That’s TNG, not LOTR.” Kris replied snootily.

    “My bad.” Said Todd.

    Todd, Judy, Kris, Trina, Karen, James Edwards, Jeff, Walter and Andy sat around a few tables, in a loose circle. 

    “So Breakfast Club.” Said Kris.

    For a moment, nobody said anything.

    “Yep.” Said Trina, and the meeting began.

    “Nobody’s accusing anybody, here…” Judy began.

    “But…” said Jeff, looking right at her.

    “But hitting the machine was unwise. You could be dead right now.” Replied Todd.

    “It was a taser.” Jeff spat right back, “And who the fuck put Judy Chong in charge?”

    “The Federal and State governments.” Judy said.

    “Who are all dead.” Jeff concluded. “And you’re HR, Chong, not Director.”

    “Governments are all probably dead.” Walter agreed. “Since it’s a month we ain’t heard nothing.”

    That seemed to settle people down a little, since variations of this conversation had been running through IGSD 14 since the day of the blast. Nobody knew who was in charge, if any rescue was 

33

coming, or if more than a handful of people were left alive on the planet. And until the robot guard dog had tasered Jeff in the arena, there wasn’t much to be done about anything.

    Taser robot guard dog appeared to be, prima facie, as Judy put it, an actionable item.

    “Scooby Doo aside,” said James Edwards, “we need to know what’s going on up there. On the surface.”

    “Quest to Mordor.” Said Kris.

    James Edwards rolled his eyes, and sat back in his chair.

    Jeff stood, and tried to look Stentorian.

    “We must all hang together, lest we all hang separately.”

    The room grew quiet, and everyone stared at everyone else.

    “How about lunch?” Walter offered.

    Everyone split off to eat, then slowly trickled back to the loose circle that ran through the cafeteria tables. Everyone brought some food or drink to the table.

    “It’s just us, and the dead.” Kris began.

    “And the robots.” Added Jeff.

    Nobody wanted to look like the bad guy. Andy was completely silent. Well-fed though the group was now, the ugly power struggle that had crept out had shocked them all. Only Jeff looked serene, like he was above all of this, like he was practical, while they squabbled. Walter watched him the closest. Charisma often paired with some dark things, Walter had observed. 

    “I feel responsible,” said Karen, quietly “because I typed Re-start.”

People were doing more listening now, taking their time, on a full stomach.

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    “It could be nukes.” Said James Edwards at last. “That the robots built. Or an EMP. But I’m just guessing.”

    The circle considered this.

    “It is guarded...” Jeff allowed. “Boy howdy, is it guarded.”

    “I think…” said Todd, who was suddenly interrupted by the sound of servo-mechanisms in the hallway. 

    A robot dog walked by the cafeteria, nosed its way into another hallway, with that kind, forgetful lady named… Belinda, wasn’t it (?)… following it at a distance.

    The circle got up to follow.

    The robot dog walked towards one of the slanted tunnels, seemingly oblivious to the humans following it (at a respectful distance.) When it came to the giant green blast door with the silver wheel on it, the dog sat on its rear haunches and waited.

    The people under ground watched the robot guard dog, and the robot guard dog watched the door.

    “What does it want?” asked James Edwards.

    The dog got up, walked forwards, raised its paw, and scratched at the door.

    “Out.” Said Trina.

    But nobody moved. Trina went to open the door, but Jeff put his hand on her arm, quite gently.

    “I wouldn’t.”

    The dog looked back at them. The light where its eyes should be went back and forth, back and forth.

    When it became apparent that the people were not going to do anything, the dog walked slowly back to where Jeff and Trina were standing. The dog looked up at them, the light where its eyes should be went back and forth, back and forth.

    “What should we…” started Jeff, but then the dog walked a slow circle around Jeff and Trina, and stared at them again.

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    Trina walked over to the door, and started turning the wheel to gradually open it, while everyone else stood stock still. When it was wide enough for the dog to go through, it squeezed out and 

was gone.

    “Might run away, but he’ll be back.” Concluded Trina.

    Walter shrugged, and followed the dog out. His head popped back around, looking at the nine or ten people gathered at the door.

    “Don’t lock me out.”

    One by one, the people underground followed him out, until only Trina waved the last one on. 

    “I’ll stay here. Make sure nobody closes the door.”

    The people under ground walked slowly up the slanted tunnel towards the surface.

    There was no light in the tunnel, and everyone had their cell phone flashlights on, keeping an eye on the ground directly in front of them, or stopping to scan around them. It was useless to try to see walls or ceiling, with such a paltry light source.

    Walter’s dim cell phone light could be seen far ahead, outlining him and lighting up not very much else as he walked upwards.

    “I’m surprised we still carry these around.” Todd said to Judy, walking beside him, as they tried to use their cell phone flashlights together, to light up the ground in front of them.

    “I guess we hope somebody might call…” whispered Judy.

    Everyone walked upwards, the group instinctively bunching up, enough to pool their cell lights a bit. Gradually their steps stopped echoing so much, as their feet started to swish, then crunch and 

squeak through… something.

    Walter was stopped up ahead, shining his cell light on himself, so the group could see him.

    “It’s just ashes. Under your feet. Sorry about the lights. I think they… burned out. Burned away. Not much longer to go now.”

    Walter turned back towards the surface, and started walking again. It was hard to judge time, and the ash got thicker and thicker as they went. In some places the roiling blackness was knee high. 

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    There were drifts of it as high as a walker’s waist, but people mostly avoided those. It wasn’t particularly heavy ash, but nobody wanted to go deeper into it. Or think too much about what it was.

A dim light grew ahead. The people below ground kept their cell lights on, because at first the light ahead was too diffuse to be useful. The light ahead was just hopeful to the walkers. 

    Gradually, the weak light showed through a jagged circle, up ahead. Walter stood waiting, a black silhouette against a weak-lit grey background.

    “Gate’s gone, except for the hinges.” Walter gestured around with his cell light, then turned it off. “I don’t know how the drains stayed clear. Maybe just the ones at the bottom of the tunnel.”

    Or maybe it doesn’t rain anymore, Walter thought to himself. He decided that wouldn’t help to say out loud though. Speculation wasn’t his game, except where it was needed to put one foot in front of the other, to stay alive.

    “Brace yourselves. It’s… a bit of a shock.” He said, and walked out into the greyness.

    Todd stood beside Judy, looking around, their two cellphone lights still on, though unnecessary in the murky grey. It felt like pre-dawn, although it was afternoon. All around them, the countryside was 

covered in a whispey grey-black blanket of ash, with a low, dark, grey sky. There were no trees, or grass, no distinguishing features of any kind. 

    “It’s cooled down a lot.” Said Walter, while everyone looked around at the devastated Earth.

    Yes, in fact, it was downright cold.

    Kris stood beside Karen, and James Edwards, who remembered to turn his cell light off. Wouldn’t do to be bingo on batteries, for the long walk back down that dark tunnel. 

    Jeff was silent, not knowing how to play this very, very new situation.

    Walter stood a bit apart from the group, watching them take it in. He had seen this already, although the smoke and heat of… impact he guessed he should call it… had not cleared when he and 

three others had first walked up to the surface. One of those first four out had been Thornton. Their

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subsequent first walk-out. Come to think of it, so had the second walk-out. Walter supposed he could ask Judy to look up that fella’s name, but decided against it. If that guy had decided to erase himself, there wasn’t much Walter could do about it.

    Walter did have recurring nightmares about this. The dead grey earth, the deader grey sky. In his dreams the hinges to the gates outside glowed a fiery red. Abandon all hope, ye who exit here… but that misquote, maybe from the stern Old-Testament harangues he had forgotten in the hollars of his youth… it didn’t help. It didn’t boil the water, make the food or change the socks in your marching 

boots.

    Andy was trying to comfort Belinda, the sleepy-eyed lady that had followed the robot dog, then the group. She was crying softly, silently, then stopped to point something out to Andy.

    “I think my house was that way.” Belinda said “And my Mum’s place was just across the street.”

    Andy just opened and closed his mouth. ‘Sorry for your troubles’ just didn’t seem enough to cover things now. Instead he just put his arm around Belinda, and looked around and around. He 

thought of his parents, back in Vermont, with their genteel subsistence hobby farm, his Dad’s meager pension more than enough in those touristy, snowy mountains.

    “Which way is Vermont?” he wondered, then thought about it. NO way. NO way is Vermont. Not anymore. He had suspected as much, below ground, but this god-damned greyness seemed to seal 

the deal. He checked his phone, deep in shock. NO SIGNAL.

    Everyone had forgotten the robot watch dog. 

    Weirdly, it was digging in the ashes, and then the dirt underneath, with its front paws. Then it stopped to sniff, dug a bit more, then stopped to sniff again. Something pushed forward from its snout, 

into the dirt, went a little deeper, then retracted again.

    “My wife wanted to get a dog.” Judy said to Todd.

    “So did mine.” Todd replied.

    “So what did you get?” Judy asked.

    “Rescue Pekingese something.” Todd said, watching the robot dig and sniff. “You?”

    “Rescue Doberman something.” Judy said, blankly. “Happy wife, happy life.”

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    The robot guard dog sat back on its haunches, the light of its eyes… eye… going back and forth. 

    Then it turned around, walked past the humans, and went back down the tunnel.

    Nobody said anything funny. Nobody spoke at all.

    It was hard to see even where the horizon was. Dark grey on dark grey.

    “Maybe we’ll be able to see more when these clouds clear…” Jeff announced to everyone, trying to figure out the mood of the group.

    Judy and Todd looked at each other discreetly.

    Those weren’t rain clouds in the sky. They were a great deal of the surface of the planet Earth, thrown into the stratosphere. And they wouldn’t be clearing for months, probably. Maybe years. 

Hopefully not decades…

    In mostly twos and threes this time, the people returned below.

    Walter went last, making sure everybody, did, in fact, walk back down the long ramp to IG Storage Depot 14.

    On the walk back down, Kris was lost in their own memories. Their family was estranged, except for the odd birthday card from their Mom, promising to “sort things out when things settled down.” It looked like that would be awhile. Permanent vacation, as the saying went.

    Kris had chosen their own family long ago, a tight-knit group of LGBTQ plus friends in town, whom they would miss most of all. A lot of red wine and roses had gone into the making of that new family, gone now to dust.

    Kris wasn’t sure if this diagonal tunnel-walking experience was more like Dungeons and Dragons, or the Greek underworld, where shades roamed in a pale imitation of life. Maybe the Hebrew

Sheol, some undefined after life. Maybe there was no after life at all, except for the staff at IGSD 14, eating, sleeping, and re-constituting pizza. The sci-fi novelized version of Dante’s Inferno wasn’t much 

help, although fun to read, in modern English. Kris wasn’t sure which circle they would belong in, or even purgatory. Purgatory, and its looming climb on the inside-out mountain of Hell (after you escaped 

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out the hole in the bottom of Hell...) Perhaps Kris belonged in Paradise, at the top of Purgatory. Were some Angels NB? Poor Dante had not thought of a person who was non-binary. One of the few things that maybe wasn’t a sin to the savage Europeans of the Middle Ages. Sure, they had been obsessed with Joan of Arc wearing pants, but after all, she was French. It was more about where you fit in the hierarchy of power, than zipper and zee zee. Oooh La La.

    The grey light faded back to blackness, with a few cellphone flashlights pointed at the floor.

    The ash thinned out as the people under the Earth walked lower.

Maybe we’re all REALLY REALLY REAL dead, thought Kris, a la Ernest Goes to Jail. Nah, if they were really dead, they wouldn’t have to pee. Not unless Stephen King were in charge of writing this. Only then they would all be just faces stuck to a giant insect, looking out in horror. And maybe having to pee, too. Jesus, that guy was so twisted. He even grossed himself out sometimes, and stuck a 

Lovecraftian warning into the forward of one particular book. A shame about his few forays into the shitshow of Cthuluism. Because the day-to-day survival horror was so much better. Had been so much better. Kris was pretty sure even old Steve King had to be reduced to atoms now. Tunnel between his two houses with a choo-choo train in it notwithstanding. Still, if a van driver full of Mars bars hadn’tbeen able to kill The King, what chance did a mere planet-fucking meteor have?

    I really do have to start writing again, thought Kris. My interior world is a little… rich? Verbose? Overpowering? Derivative? Infantalising?Jesus, who does this? Tries to choose the right world while they walk down an inky-blackcorridor to a Reverse Logan’s Run Shtalag Thirteen? That was the Hogan’s Heros’ camp, wasn’t it?

    And since there didn’t appear to be an internet anymore, it seemed like Kris’s interconnected musings were the only record of world literature. The only literature outside of the selection in the LAN at the bottom of this slanted spillway. 

    Nice sibilance, thought Kris to themselves. Yep, they would have to start writing again, just so this kind of shit didn’t slip out into regular conversation with the other people below. I’ve just got to 

mentally barf this stuff out. As a dog returneth to its own vomit… Jimmy Olsen to the rescue…Kris tried to clear their mind as the group walked lower.

    Taking great care not to sing out loud, Kris let the Smurf song wash over them. It was one approach to stop the endless flow of fiction in their consciousness. Even thought the smurfing song was, in itself, fiction…

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    Much as Kris prized their ability to step vicariously into someone else’s shoes, the stories had to stop. At some point.

    You meet at the Inn, Kris thought to themself, as the Smurfing Song faded in their head. Fat Jeebus. Nothing for it. Time to scribble. Only question was, to write on a lap-top, or paper 

and pen? Crayon and construction paper? Carving on the walls with a screwdriver? Was IGSD 14 their Overlook Hotel? Seemed like a good idea at the time, but the writing just… kind of ran away with them? 

    Best to use a lap-top, useless as that now was. Password protection might be their only friend down here, under ground. Under ground. Underground. Still, Kris had never been able to sit down and read Catcher in the Rye. Catcher in the Rye and Zombies? Nah, not even.

     When the people went back through the cracked-open portal, into the welcoming electric lights again, Trina was gone. 

    Walter found her in the nearest empty dorm room, snoring a little bit.

    “What happened to you?” Walter asked, as Trina looked around like she was late for work.

    “My back started to hurt while I waited, so I just laid down for a second…”

    Walter nodded. Yep, that was the thing about guard duty. It was likely to make your back and feet hurt real quick. And put you to sleep. And that was for twenty-year olds. Trina had to be pushing 

seventy. Or more. Best to have some snacks to keep you awake. And some gear to work on. A K-Bar to sharpen, or para cord to weave around something. Then Walter remembered Trina knitting in the arena. 

    That must be kind of like wrapping para cord. Guess she hadn’t thought to bring her knitting to the Breakfast Club meeting, before the robot guard dog had led them up to the surface.

    “But you woulda opened back up for us, right? If somebody closed the door, and spun that wheel?” Walter asked, conspiratorially.

    “Yep. Eventually. I would have remembered. Trying to figure out where everybody went.”

    “And the dog? Which way did he go?” Walter asked.

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    “Dog?” Trina asked.

    “Robot guard dog.” Walter replied. “Tasered Jeff. In the arena.”

    “Right in the Arena?” Trina joked.

    Walter smiled again. 

    “Yep, the robot guard dog that tasered Jeff, right in the Arena.”

    “Oh THAT dog.” Trina said.

    “Yeah, THAT dog…” Walter coaxed.

    “Haven’t seen him.” Trina replied, and rubbed her eyes a bit. She laid back down to finish her nap, embarrassed or not.

    “So where was the dog?” Todd asked Walter, over a stack of paper on Todd’s desk.

    “Went back home, like Trina figured.” 

    “Home?” Todd said.

    “Back to his compass point, guarding the machine.”

    “What the fuck?” asked Todd, (All But Dissertation) PhD.

    “What the fuck indeed, Sir.” Agreed Walter, U.S. Army Cook, (Retired.)

    Belinda was having Karen over for herbal tea, in her dorm room. Neither of them drank the high-octane REAL tea any more, as sleep was hard to come by, and drowsiness at work was hardly an 

issue after the blast. What could they do if you fell asleep at your desk? Fire you? Put your things in a 

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cardboard box and escort you to the surface? Send you to Judy, in HR? We simply don’t feel you’re focusing on the job, perhaps a little time off would be just the thing… 

    “I don’t think it’s your fault.” Belinda, of Data Entry, said to Karen, of Office Management.

    “But if I hadn’t typed in “Re-start” the robots wouldn’t have started…”

    “Wouldn’t they?” Belinda asked, absently sipping her tea.

    “They wouldn’t have built the… machine thing, and that dog wouldn’t have tasered Jeff…” Karen 

moaned.

    “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.” Belinda said, sleepily.

    The women looked at each other, and smiled.

    “Oopsie.” Said Belinda. “Maybe that’s just the Chamomile talking.”

    “I’m just worried about what those things might do. What do you think they built?” Karen asked.

    Belinda took her time, sipped her tea.

    “I don’t know. This is … is this the end of everything? I mean… We’ll see.”

    “We’ll see?” Karen echoed, incredulous.

    “After my Mom went into care, I thought it was so bad, I thought I was evil and selfish for putting her there.” Belinda said.

    Karen waited. Belinda sipped.

    “But she was doing better. She was just across the street. She could even come over and sit with The Big Three.” Belinda came out of her reverie, long enough to explain. “It’s what I called my 

cats. Only two of them could fit on her lap at a time. The third would have to wait and meow.”

    Karen waited, and thought of her own daughter in Florida.

    “And so I thought that was good. And then…”

    Belinda stopped talking, and looked around, then up at the ceiling. She couldn’t finish what she was saying.

    “And then the blast.” Karen finished for her. Belinda nodded.

    “Yes. And that was bad.” Belinda managed, after taking a deep breath.

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    “And you’re suggesting the robots might turn out to be good?” Karen asked.

    Belinda sipped her tea, paused, then sipped again, eyes empty.

    “I’m suggesting it doesn’t fucking matter.”

    Todd could not figure out what the noise in his office was. He looked around, up and away from the equation that was defeating him so thoroughly. Where had he gone wrong, and what the FUCK was that noise?

    Scratching? It by-god sounded like scratching.

    And then he saw it. A little mouse with gigantic ears, and tiny, frightened coal-black eyes looking at him from beside a stack of papers.

    Man and mouse stared at each other for a long time. At first it seemed that the law of the jungle had been suspended. Like nature, red in tooth and claw, was taking a break.

    Todd should have been horrified, he knew. Mice, or rats, had probably killed more humans than any other animal, transmitting yersinia pestis from pre-agricultural times, up to and beyond the heyday of the black plague, killing between 25 and 50 million Europeans between 1347 and 1352. About a third of Europe at the time.

    “You bringing back the plague?” Todd asked the mouse, expecting it to run off. But it just seemed to freeze into place harder, unwilling to move before Todd did. 

    “You’re a bit late.” Todd told the mouse.

    “Is that a mouse?” asked James Edwards from the doorway to Todd’s office. 

    “Yep.” Concluded Todd, without moving.

    “Huh.” Said James Edwards, staring at the first animal he had seen since The End of the World.

    “You’re gonna say we should kill it, aren’t you?” Todd asked.

    Edwards, who was eating a small bag of sunflower seeds, threw one of the seeds to the mouse. 

    “Depends.” Replied Edwards.

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    “He’s eating it.” Said Todd “Depends on what?”

    “Depends on if he’s the last one.” James Edwards said. “Had a buddy who went Astronaut. I told him ‘never go full astronaut.’ But away he went. Into space.”

    “And he died?” asked Todd.

    “Unless he was still in space, he did.” James Edwards answered.

    Yes, Todd supposed, unless he was still in space. Although Todd hadn’t thought of actual astronauts since the blast, only satellites, and how much EMP would have been generated by a 

planetary comet/asteroid impact. If any. He was a mathematician, after all, not a physicist. Close cousins, but not exactly the same. Damn, he thought, I hope they have escape pods up there. But what was Edwards’ point about astronauts?

    “And…” said Todd.

    “And he told me they grew wheat up in space.”

    “Wheat?”

    “Yep. Stalks of wheat. And a dandelion seed that, lord knows how, snuck in there with the wheat.” James Edwards expanded his story.

    “So they killed the dandelion?” asked Todd.

    “They called it Fred.” Said James Edwards. “And they watered it, and the wheat, and they talked to it, and the wheat, and they basically just went full astronaut with that shit.”

    Todd nodded, once, watching the mouse, and smiled.

    James threw the mouse another sunflower seed, which it also ate.

    “Never go full astronaut.” James Edwards finished his story.

    Todd agreed.

    “Never go full astronaut. Right Fred?”

    Fred the mouse seemed to agree, snacking on his third sunflower seed.

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    That evening, Trina opened the door for James Edwards, down next to the kitchens, in her domain. James Edwards turned on the lights, and took a good, long look around.

    “How many of them did you see?” Trina asked.

    “Just the one. But I guess if you see one, how many don’t you see?”

    “That’s probably true.” Trina guessed.

    “And if they eat all this…” James Edwards let that hang in the air, then went back to searching through the stacks and stacks of freeze-dried food, most of which was stored in big, metallic foot-locker-looking things.

    “Yep.” Trina agreed.

    “So keep your eye out for mouse poop. And let me know. Hell, I’ll come down and look myself. But you look too. Please.” Edwards added, adding politeness to the mix, not just because the world had 

maybe ended up above, but because this was so important. 

With the stores they had at IGSD 14, they could survive indefinitely. Unless, of course, a plague of mice ate them out of house and home. Then it would be the mice they ate. And then each other, if 

you believed Jeff Coulter, over in book-keeping. Not that he had mentioned the mice to Jeff. Not just yet. So far, the people down below had managed to keep from rioting, or killing each other for fun.

    “I’ll keep an eye out. But we can respect the animal.” Trina said.

    “Make ourselves some mouse-fur coats?” James Edwards joked, and mocked, without realizing he was doing it.

    “Might be our only companion now.” Trina said.

    Full fucking astronaut, James Edwards thought. Inevitable, really.

To Be Continued in Re-Start Ready - Chapter 2 "Even After All This"

Illustrations Ch.1 by Andrew Debly, Doodles by John Mick