Yana was rubbing her temples. She could feel the throbbing pressure of a headache developing behind her eyes. First of all, the battle that she tried to walk away from, the battle that she tried to forfeit, was the battle for the entire world. She almost surrendered Earth to some unknown alien force without even a fight! All because she was late for dinner. This thought was a constant presence in the back of her mind, playing on repeat, riding waves of irrational fear and general dread.
Then, her hope to see an actual battle, to judge the opponents, to come up with some kind of a plan completely fell through. The witch, who was undoubtedly one of Yana’s ancestors, pushed the battle back, all the way back right into Yana’s lap. That woman must have hundreds of descendants, why me? Why bring me all the way from Chicago for this? Yana put aside this line of questioning for later. After all, what was she supposed to do – dump the fate of the whole world on some other oblivious woman just to go home and watch TV?
Yana did learn a few important things. First of all, the rules of the battle were not set in stone. There were plenty of rule changes that happened in response to the humans’ questioning and strangely enough, the rules didn’t seem to have been thought out very well by the messaging party. And most importantly, Elohim seemed to be a neutral party, but one who could possibly be swayed by the charms of a woman.
For the last half an hour Yana has been trying to bargain, beg, plead, flirt, and compliment her way out of the impending battle, but all her efforts were in vain. Elohim was adamant that he could not disable his long-term transmissions again, he could not prevent a wormhole from opening which would bring forth enemy combatants, as he no longer had high-level access to his own functions. Yana didn’t know any prayers, so she got on her knees and recited her favorite Russian poems from Voznesenskij and Mandelshtam (“Take happiness from my palm, a little sunlight, a little honey… Our kisses like tiny fuzzy bees, doomed to die once outside the beehive…”). She sang praises to Elohim, how smart, generous, and humane he was, how much she loved him and how he loved her, and that he would never abandon her and would do everything possible to help her.
The boulder beamed in the sunlight and hummed in tune, clearly enjoying the flattery. But in the end, he had no answers. He didn’t know who the messages were from, who the enemy was, how they can be beaten, how to delay the battle… He didn’t even know who he was. But the worst part was how long each answer took. There was a significant pause after every question, and then the boulder produced an incomplete answer that always required multiple follow-ups and clarifications. This reminded Yana of trying to order something through Alexa without knowing the exact name of the product or being stuck in an interactive voice response queue with no option to reach the operator.
No, Yana thought, actually this most closely resembled trying to use a clunky graphics user interface instead of writing a robust PowerShell script. Yana was surprised at this thought. She’s been in IT for over twenty years, yet it has never been part of her identity or something she spent any after-work hours thinking about. It was a job, it paid the bills, that’s it. It wasn’t like her to be dreaming of bypassing voice service with root permissions to the database. If only she could get her hands on a keyboard…
There was a tiny flash of light from the boulder’s long side. Yana glanced over and saw something protruding from Elohim’s side. It was a dark shiny keyboard and the rockface above it had almost a glasslike quality, approximately the size of a 27-inch monitor.
Is it that easy, Yana wondered, can I just ask for things? She remembered the magically appearing steak knife, long abandoned on the fallen tree trunk.
“A computer chair, please!” she said in a very casual voice as if ordering pancakes at a diner.
With a bright flash, an exact replica of her home computer chair appeared. Or maybe it was her own computer chair, teleported from her condo? If so, hopefully, no one was sitting on it when it disappeared. Yana sat down, got comfortable, and pressed Enter on the keyboard. The “monitor” flickered on and instead of an incomprehensible alien script, Yana was relieved to see the good old command line.
C:\
All right, thought Yana, let’s see what subdirectories and files we have. Ten minutes later she dug up something resembling a login script, with a list of commands to be executed upon receiving the activation signal. The signal was received earlier today from… (Yana carefully counted twelve zeros) 30 trillion miles away. Each following line needed to be deciphered carefully. As far as she could tell, the first command was related to her own teleportation. The second line…
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
“Elohim!” Yana said, barely hiding her irritation, “Were you supposed to provide me with weapons and information about the battle? Am I reading this correctly?”
“Yes,” responded Elohim, “I provided you with a steak knife and the Introduction Video.”
Yana opened and closed her mouth silently. She didn’t want to start speaking before regaining her composure, but the words came tumbling out:
“Listen to me, you shitty ChatGPT, you were supposed to do all of that AUTOMATICALLY. I had to run around here with a cucumber, asking you a million questions until you finally played that video!”
“You canceled all automatic steps upon your arrival.” Elohim said, “Your first command to me was Stop. So, I stopped.”
Yana thought back to that moment when the warm air in her kitchen was instantly replaced by a fresh breeze blowing through her hair, and the sudden sunlight which made her squint. She remembered her throat filling with acid and vomiting, recalling her dead mother, having no idea where she was… and wanting all of this to stop.
Yana sighed, “Not everything that’s said around you is said to you! Try to remember that.”
Elohim hummed.
“The third command is multiple teleportations from all over the world. Who is to be teleported?” Yana asked. She was pretty sure that descendants #1 through #5 were going to be dropped into this field, away from their mundane lives, but just wanted to double-check.
“I do not know the content of orders until they are executed. You have made it so.”
Yana had no idea what he was talking about. Did she once again have some arbitrary thought that Elohim took as a command?
She read through the fourth command and slowly exhaled. A large warm hole to be opened to another solar system, no doubt to allow the enemy combatants to come through.
“What happens if I never give you the command to run through this script?” Yana asked.
“The third step, as was the second step, is optional. You can decide whether to run it or not. The fourth step will be executed automatically in twenty minutes.”
Yana felt her insides go cold.
“It’s time to assemble my army, Elohim,” she said, “Run command #3.”
In the corner of her eye, she saw a bright flash and heard a heavy thump behind her. Yana swiveled around in her chair and saw four figures in the field, two standing in awkward positions and two picking themselves off the ground where they collapsed when their chairs or couches disappeared from under them. With the sun in her eyes, she couldn’t see their faces but heard them begin talking to each other, their voices panicked and strained. At least one was throwing up. Yana figured it was best to let them settle in and calm down a bit before springing the whole “battle for Earth” scenario on them.
She now had five unprepared men to defend the Earth. This felt like very much a “throw a cat on it” situation. This was an old family joke, stemming from the fact that Yana’s father, a man who could handle anything from a natural disaster to single-handedly building a house, had a crippling phobia of rodents. Any time a mouse, a rat, a chipmunk, or even a squirrel with a skinny tail made its way inside the house, her father always resorted to the same useless solution. He would run and grab their old fat cat, who was always sleeping on the same armchair in the living room and would throw it at the furry intruder. The cat would heavily land on all four feet, indifferently look over the potential prey, and then turn around to meander back to the living room, only to be grabbed and thrown by Yana’s father again. This never failed to make Yana, her sister, and her mother laugh. Since then, any half-assed unlikely-to-work solution was referred to as “throwing a cat on it”.
She needed to at least arm this cat.
“Elohim, I need weapons. All acceptable weapons for this battle, five each. No, ten each, just in case.”
Yana inspected the newly appeared pile of weapons in the grass - swords, daggers, knives, spears, and whips. What I wouldn’t give for a few AK-47s, she thought, and maybe a tank. While racking her brains for modern weapons that didn’t use projectiles to inflict damage, Yana glanced back and realized there were only four men in various states of panic behind her.
“Elohim, how many men did you teleport here?” she asked.
“Five,” Elohim said.
Yana signed. It was too early in the day to be losing men. She walked towards them briskly and ignoring their calls of “Do you know where we are?” and “How did we get here?” and “Who are you? Can you help us?”, put her hand up to stop the avalanche of questions and sternly said “How many of you are here? Four or five?”
“There are four of us,” someone answered and another voice, with a distinctive Scottish accent, added, “There is a bloke over there in the grass, sleeping.”
In the following few seconds of silence, Yana could distinctly hear rhythmic snoring coming from the tall grass.
“Wake him up,” Yana ordered, “Then come to me for further instructions.”
She went back to her chair and tried to compose in her head what she would tell these men, how she would explain the situation, and what proof she might need to give. When Yana heard their footsteps and voices behind her, she readied herself and swiveled the chair around. It was the first time Yana could clearly make out their faces.
This day so far has been one insane thing after another – teleportation, transmutation, a rock that answers prayers, holograms, a Jewish witch, a battle for Earth... But here was one thing that made absolutely no sense.
Yana knew all of these men.